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TABLE-TALK; 



ORIGINAL ESSAYS. 



BY WILLIAM HAZLITT. 



LONDON : 
JOHN WAKREN, OLD BOND-STREET 



Mococxxr. 



•75 

12 XI 






LONDON: 

rillNTKD )tr THOMAS DAVISON, WIIITKFnTAItS. 



ADVERTISEMENT. 



It may be proper to observe, that the Essays 
" On the Pleasure of Painting" and " On the 
Ignorance of the Learned" in this Volume, have 
already appeared in periodical publications. 



CONTENTS. 



Page 
Essay I. — On the Pleasure of Painting ... 1 

Essay II. — The same Subject continued . . 23 

Essay III. — On the Past and Future ... 43 

Essay IV. — On Genius and Common Sense . . 65 

Essay V. — The same Subject continued . . 91 

Essay VI. — Character of Cobbett .... 113 

Essay VII. — On People with one Idea . . .135 

Essay VIII. — On the Ignorance of the Learned . 159 

Essay IX. — The Indian Jugglers . . . .179 

Essay X. — On Living to one's-self .... 209 

Essay XI. — On Thought and Action . . . 235 

Essay XII. — On Will-making .... 265 

Essay XIII. — On certain Inconsistencies in Sir Joshua 

Reynolds's Discourses 287 

Essay XIV. — The same Subject continued . . 311 

Essay XV. — On Paradox and Common-place . 34-7 

Essay XVI.— On Vulgarity and Affectation . . 373 



ESSAY I. 
ON THE PLEASURE OF PAINTING. 



ESSAY I. 

ON THE PLEASURE OF PAINTING, 



" Tpiere is a pleasure in painting which none 
but painters know." In writing, you have to 
contend with the world ; in painting, you have 
only to carry on a friendly strife with Nature. 
You sit down to your task, and are happy. From 
the moment that you take up the pencil, and 
look Nature in the face, you are at peace with 
your own heart. No angry passions rise to 
disturb the silent progress of the work, to 
shake the hand, or dim the brow : no irritable 
humours are set afloat : you have no absurd 
opinions to combat, no point to strain, no ad- 
versary to crush, no fool to annoy — you are 
actuated by fear or favour to no man. There 
is " no juggling here," no sophistry, no intrigue, 
no tampering with the evidence, no attempt 
to make black white, or white black : but you 
resign yourself into the hands of a greater 
power, that of Nature, with the simplicity of 
a child, aud the devotion of an enthusiast — 

B '2 



4 ON THE PLEASURE OF PAINTING. 

" study with joy her manner, and with rapture 
taste her style." The mind is calm, and full at 
the same time. The hand and eye are equally 
employed. In tracing the commonest object, 
a plant or the stump of a tree, you learn some- 
thing every moment. You perceive unexpected 
differences, and discover likenesses where you 
looked for no such thing. You try to set down 
what you see — find out your error, and correct 
it. You need not play tricks, or purposely mis- 
take : with all your pains, you are still far short 
of the mark. Patience grows out of the endless 
pursuit, and turns it into a luxury. A streak 
in a flower, a wrinkle in a leaf, a tinge in a 
cloud, a stain in an old wall or ruin grey, are 
seized with avidity as the spolia opima of this 
sort of mental warfare, and furnish out labour 
for another half-day. The hours pass away 
untold, without chagrin, and without weariness; 
nor would you ever wish to pass them other- 
wise. Innocence is joined with industry, plea- 
sure with business ; and the mind is satisfied, 
though it is not engaged in thinking or in doing 
any mischief*. 

* There is a passage in Werter which contains a very 
pleasing illustration of this doctrine, and is as follows. 

" About a league from the town is a place called Walheim. 
It is very agreeably situated on the side of a hill: from one 



ON THE PLEASURE OF PAINTING. 5 

I have not much pleasure in writing these 
Essays, or in reading them afterwards ; though 
I own I now and then meet with a phrase that 
I like, or a thought that strikes me as a true 
one. But after I begin them, I am only anxious 
to get to the end of them, which I am not 

of the paths which leads out of the village, you have a view 
of the whole country; and there is a good old woman who 
sells wine, coffee, and tea there : but better than all this are 
two lime-trees before the church, which spread their branches 
over a little green, surrounded by barns and cottages. I 
have seen few places more retired and peaceful. I send for 
a chair and table from the old woman's, and there I drink 
my coffee and read Homer. It was by accident that I dis- 
covered this place one fine afternoon : all was perfect still- 
ness ; every body was in the fields, except a little boy about 
four years old, who was sitting on the ground, and holding 
between his knees a child of about six months ; he pressed 
it to his bosom with his little arms, which made a sort of 
great chair for it ; and notwithstanding the vivacity which 
sparkled in his eyes, he sat perfectly still. Quite delighted 
with the scene, I sat down on a plough opposite, and had 
great pleasure in drawing this little picture of brotherly 
tenderness. I added a bit of the hedge, the barn-door, and 
some broken cart-wheels, without any order, just as they 
happened to lie ; and in about an hour I found I had made a 
drawing of great expression and very correct design, without 
having put in any thing of my own. This confirmed me in the 
resolution I had made before, only to copy nature for the 
future. Nature is inexhaustible, and alone forms the greatest 
masters. Say what you will of rules, they alter the true 
features, and the natural expression." Page 15. 



6 ON THE PLEASURE OF PAINTING. 

sure I shall do, for I seldom see my way a page 
or even a sentence beforehand ; and when I 
have as by a miracle escaped, I trouble myself 
little more about them. I sometimes have to 
write them twice over : then if is necessary to 
read the proof, to prevent mistakes by the 
printer ; so that by the time they appear in a 
tangible shape, and one can con them over with 
a conscious, sidelong glance to the public ap- 
probation, they have lost their gloss and relish, 
and become " more tedious than a twice-told 
tale." For a person to read his own works over 
with any great delight, he ought first to forget 
that he ever wrote them. Familiarity naturally 
breeds contempt. It is, in fact, like poring 
fondly over a piece of blank paper : from re- 
petition, the words convey no distinct meaning 
to the mind, are mere idle sounds, except that 
our vanity claims an interest and property in 
them. I have more satisfaction in my own 
thoughts than in dictating them to others : 
words are necessary to explain the impression 
of certain things upon me to the reader, but 
they rather weaken and draw a veil over than 
strengthen it to myself. However I might say 
with the poet, " My mind to me a kingdom is," 
yet I have little ambition " to set a throne or 
chair of state in the understandings of other 



ON THE PLEASURE OF PAINTIXG. 7 

men." The ideas we cherish most, exist best 
in a kind of shadowy abstraction, 

" Pure in the last recesses of the mind ;" 

and derive neither force nor interest from being 
exposed to public view. They are old familiar 
acquaintance, and any change in them, arising 
from the adventitious ornaments of style or 
dress, is little to their advantage. After I have 
once written on a subject, it goes out of my 
mind : my feelings about it have been melted 
down into words, and them I forget. I have, as 
it w T ere, discharged my memory of its old ha- 
bitual reckoning, and rubbed out the score of 
real sentiment. For the future, it exists only 
for the sake of others. — But I cannot say, 
from my own experience, that the same process 
takes place in transferring our ideas to canvas; 
they gain more than they lose in the mechanical 
transformation. One is never tired of painting, 
because you have to set down not what you 
knew already, but what you have just discovered. 
In the former case, you translate feelings into 
words ; in the latter, names into things. There 
is a continual creation out of nothing going on. 
With every stroke of the brush, a new field of 
inquiry is laid open ; new difficulties arise, and 
new triumphs are prepared over them. By com- 



8 ON THE PLEASURE OF PAINTING. 

paring the imitation with the original, you see 
what you have done, and how much you have 
still to do. The test of the senses is severer 
than that of fancy, and an over-match even for 
the delusions of our self-love. One part of a 
picture shames another, and you determine to 
paint up to yourself, if you cannot come up to 
nature. Every object becomes lustrous from 
the light thrown back upon it by the mirror of 
art : and by the aid of the pencil we may be 
said to touch and handle the objects of sight. 
The air-drawn visions that hover on the verge 
of existence have a bodily presence given them 
on the canvas : the form of beauty is changed 
into a substance : the dream and the glory of 
the universe is made " palpable to feeling as to 
sight." — And see ! a rainbow starts from the 
canvas, witji all its humid train of glory, as if it 
were drawn from its cloudy arch in heaven. 
The spangled landscape glitters with drops of 
dew after the shower. The "fleecy fools'* show 
their coats in the gleams of the setting sun. The 
shepherds pipe their farewell notes in the fresh 
evening air. And is this bright vision made from 
a dead dull blank, like a bubble reflecting the 
mighty fabric of the universe? Who would 
think this miracle of Rubens's pencil possible to' 
be performed ? Who, having seen it, would not 






ON THE PLEASURE OF PAINTING. 9 

spend his life to do the like ? See how the rich 
fallows, the bare stubble-field, the scanty harvest- 
home, drag in Rembrandt's landscapes ! How 
often have I looked at them and nature, and tried 
to do the same, till the very " light thickened," 
and there was an earthiness in the feeling of the 
air ! There is no end of the refinements of art 
and nature in this respect. One may look at 
the misty glimmering horizon till the eye dazzles 
and the imagination is lost, in hopes to transfer 
the whole interminable expanse at one blow 
upon the canvas. Wilson said, he used to try 
to paint the effect of the motes dancing in the 
setting sun. At another time, a friend coming 
into his painting-room when he was sitting on 
the ground in a melancholy posture, observed 
that his picture looked like a landscape after a 
shower : he started up with the greatest delight, 
and said, " That is the effect I intended to pro- 
duce, but thought I had failed." Wilson was 
neglected; and, by degrees, neglected his art 
to apply himself to brandy. His hand became 
unsteady, so that it was only by repeated at- 
tempts that he could reach the place, or pro- 
duce the effect he aimed at ; and when he had 
done a little to a picture, he would say to any 
acquaintance who chanced to drop in, " I have 
painted enough for one day : come, let us go 



10 ON THE PLEASURE OF PAINTING. 

somewhere." It was not so Claude left his 
pictures, or his studies on the banks of the 
Tiber, to go in search of other enjoyments, or 
ceased to gaze upon the glittering sunny vales 
and distant hills ; and while his eye drank in the 
clear sparkling hues and lovely forms of nature, 
his hand stamped them on the lucid canvas to 
last there for ever ! — One of the most delightful 
parts of my life was one fine summer, when I 
used to walk out of an evening to catch the last 
light of the sun, gemming the green slopes or 
russet lawns, and gilding tower or tree, while the 
blue sky gradually turning to purple and gold, 
or skirted with dusky grey, hung its broad 
marble pavement over all, as we see it in the 
great master of Italian landscape. But to come 
to a more particular explanation of the subject. 
The first head I ever tried to paint was an old 
woman with the upper part of the face shaded 
by her bonnet, and I certainly laboured it with 
great perseverance. It took me numberless 
sittings to do it. I have it by me still, and some- 
times look at it with surprise, to think how much 
pains were thrown away to little purpose, — yet 
not altogether in vain if it taught me to see good 
in every thing, and to know that there is nothing 
vulgar in nature seen with the eye of science or 
of true art. Refinement creates beauty every- 



ON THE PLEASURE OF PAINTING. 11 

where : it is the grossness of the spectator that 
discovers nothing but grossness in the object. 
Be this as it may, I spared no pains to do my 
best. If art was long, I thought that life was 
so too at that moment. I got in the general 
effect the first day ; and pleased and surprised 
enough I was at my success. The rest was a 
work of time — of weeks and months (if need 
were) of patient toil and careful finishing. I 
had seen an old head by Rembrandt at Burleigh- 
House, and if I could produce a head at all like 
Rembrandt in a year, in my life-time, it would 
be glory and felicity and wealth and fame 
enough for me ! The head I had seen at Burleigh 
was an exact and wonderful fac-simile of nature, 
and I resolved to make mine (as nearly as I 
could) an exact fac-simile of nature. I did not 
then, nor do I now believe, with Sir Joshua, that 
the perfection of art consists in giving general 
appearances without individual details, but in 
giving general appearances with individual de- 
tails. Otherwise, I had done my work the first 
day. But I saw something more in nature than 
general effect, and I thought it worth my while 
to give it in the picture. There was a gorgeous 
effect of light and shade : but there was a de- 
licacy as well as depth in the chiaro scuro, which 



12 ON THE PLEASURE OF PAINTING. 

I was bound to follow into all its dim and scarce 
perceptible variety of tone and shadow. Then 
I had to make the transition from a strong light 
to as dark a shade, preserving the masses, but 
gradually softening off the intermediate parts. 
It was so in nature : the difficulty was to make 
it so in the copy. I tried, and failed again and 
again ; I strove harder, and succeeded as I 
thought. The wrinkles in Rembrandt were not 
hard lines ; but broken and irregular. I saw 
the same appearance in nature, and strained 
every nerve to give it. If I could hit off this 
edgy appearance, and insert the reflected light 
in the furrows of old age in half a morning, I 
did not think I had lost a day. Beneath the 
shrivelled yellow parchment look of the skin, 
there was here and there a streak of the blood 
colour tinging the face ; this I made a point of 
conveying, and did not cease to compare what I 
saw with what I did (with jealous lynx-eyed 
watchfulness) till I succeeded to the best of my 
ability and judgment. How many revisions 
were there! How many attempts to catch an 
expression which I had seen the day before! 
How often did we try to get the old position, 
and wait for the return of the same light ! There 
was a puckering up of the lips, a cautious intro- 



ON THE PLEASURE OF PAINTING. 13 

version of the eye under the shadow of the 
bonnet, indicative of the feebleness and sus- 
picion of old age, which at last we managed, 
after many trials and some quarrels, to a to- 
lerable nicety. The picture was never finished, 
and I might have gone on with it to the present 
hour*. I used to set it on the ground when my 
day's work was done, and saw revealed to me 
with swimming eyes the birth of new hopes, and 
of a new world of objects. The painter thus 
learns to look at nature with different eyes. He 
before saw her " as in a glass darkly, but now 
face to face." He understands the texture and 
meaning of the visible universe, and " sees into 
the life of things,' ' not by the help of mecha- 
nical instruments, but of the improved exercise 
of his faculties, and an intimate sympathy with 
nature. The meanest thing is not lost upon him, 
for he looks at it with an eye to itself, not merely 
to his own vanity or interest, or the opinion of 
the world. Even where there is neither beauty 
nor use — if that ever were — still there is truth, 
and a sufficient source of gratification in the in- 
dulgence of curiosity and activity of mind. The 
humblest painter is a true scholar; and the best 

* It is at present covered with a thick slough of oil and 
varnish (the perishable vehicle of the English school) like 
an envelope of gold-beaters' skin, so as to be hardly visible. 



14s ON THE PLEASURE OF PAINTING. 

of scholars — the scholar of nature. For myself, 
and for the real comfort and satisfaction of the 
thing, I had rather have been Jan Steen, or 
Gerard Dow, than the greatest casuist or philo- 
loger that ever lived. The painter does not 
view things in clouds or " mist, the common 
gloss of theologians," but applies the same 
standard of truth and disinterested spirit of 
inquiry, that influence his daily practice, to 
other subjects. He perceives form, he dis- 
tinguishes character. He reads men and books 
with an intuitive eye. He is a critic as well as 
a connoisseur. The conclusions he draws are 
clear and convincing, because they are taken 
from the things themselves. He is not a fanatic, 
a dupe, or a slave : for the habit of seeing for 
himself also disposes him to judge for himself. 
The most sensible men I know (taken as a class) 
are painters ; that is, they are the most lively 
observers of what passes in the world about 
them, and the closest observers of what passes 
in their own minds. From their profession they 
in general mix more with the world than authors ; 
and if they have not the same fund of acquired 
knowledge, are obliged to rely more on indivi- 
dual sagacity. I might mention the names of 
Opie, Fuseli, Northcote, as persons distinguished 
for striking description and acquaintance with 



ON THE PLEASURE OF PAINTING. 1,5 

the subtle traits of character*. Painters in or- 
dinary society, or in obscure situations where 
their value is not known, and they are treated 
with neglect and indifference, have sometimes a 
forward self-sufficiency of manner : but this is 
not so much their fault as that of others. Perhaps 
their want of regular education may also be in 
fault in such cases. Richardson, who is very 
tenacious of the respect in which the profession 
ought to be held, tells a story of Michael 
Angelo, that after a quarrel between him and 
Pope Julius II. " upon account of a slight the 
artist conceived the pontiff had put upon him, 
Michael Angelo was introduced by a bishop, 
who, thinking to serve the artist by it, made 
it an argument that the Pope should be re- 
conciled to him, because men of his profession 
were commonly ignorant, and of no consequence 
otherwise : his holiness, enraged at the bishop, 
struck him with his staff, and told him, it was he 
that was the blockhead, and affronted the man 

* Men in business, who are answerable with their fortunes 
for the consequences of their opinions, and are therefore ac- 
customed to ascertain pretty accurately the grounds on whicli 
they act, before they commit themselves on the event, arc 
often men of remarkably quick and sound judgments. Artists 
in like manner must know tolerably well what they arc about, 
before they can bring the result of their observations to the 
test of ocular demonstration. 



16 ON THE PLEASURE OF PAINTING. 

himself Would not offend ; the prelate was driven 
out of the chamber, and Michael Angelo had 
the Pope's benediction accompanied with pre- 
sents. This bishop had fallen into the vulgar 
error, and was rebuked accordingly." 

Besides the exercise of the mind, painting 
exercises the body. It is a mechanical as well 
as a liberal art. To do any thing, to dig a hole 
in the ground, to plant a cabbage, to hit a mark, 
to move a shuttle, to work a pattern, — in a word, 
to attempt to produce any effect, and to succeed, 
has something in it that gratifies the love of 
power, and carries off the restless activity of the 
mind of man. Indolence is a delightful but dis- 
tressing state . we must be doing something to 
be happy. Action is no less necessary than 
thought to the instinctive tendencies of the 
human frame; and painting combines them 
both incessantly*. The hand furnishes a prac- 
tical test of the correctness of the eye ; and the 
eye thus admonished, imposes fresh tasks of 
skill and industry upon the hand. Every stroke 
tells, as the verifying of a new truth ; and every 
new observation, the instant it is made, passes 
into an act and emanation of the will. Every 

* The famous Schiller used to say, that he found the great 
happiness of life, after all, to consist in the discharge of some 
mechanical duty. 



ON THE PLEASURE OF PAINTING. 17 

step is nearer what we wish, and yet there is 
always more to do. In spite of the facility, the 
fluttering grace, the evanescent hues, that play 
round the pencil of Rubens and Vandyke, 
however I may admire, I do not envy them this 
power so much as I do the slow, patient, laborious 
execution of Correggio, Leonardo da Vinci, and 
Andrea del Sarto, where every touch appears 
conscious of its charge, emulous of truth, and 
where the painful artist has so distinctly wrought, 

" That you might almost say his picture thought !" 

In the one case, the colours seem breathed on 
the canvas as by magic, the work and the wonder 
of a moment : in the other, they seem inlaid in 
the body of the work, and as if it took the 
artist years of unremitting labour, and of de- 
lightful never-ending progress to perfection*. 
Who would wish ever to come to the close of 
such works, — not to dwell on them, to return 
to them, to be wedded to them to the last ? 
Rubens, with his florid, rapid style, complained 
that when he had just learned his art, he should 

* The rich impasting of Titian and Giorgione combines 
something of the advantages of both these styles, the felicitj 
of the one with the carefulness of the other, and is perhaps 
to be preferred to either. 






18 ON THE PLEASURE OF PAINTING. 

be forced to die. Leonardo, in the slow ad- 
vances of his, had lived long enough ! 

Painting is not, like writing, what is properly 
understood by a sedentary employment. It re- 
quires not indeed a strong, but a continued and 
steady exertion of muscular power. The pre- 
cision and delicacy of the manual operation 
makes up for the want of vehemence, — as to 
balance himself for any time in the same po- 
sition the rope-dancer must strain every jierve. 
Painting for a whole morning gives one as 
excellent an appetite for one's dinner, as old 
Abraham Tucker acquired for his by riding over 
Banstead Downs. It is related of Sir Joshua 
Reynolds, that " he took no other exercise than 
what he used in his painting-room," — the writer 
means, in walking backwards and forwards to 
look at his picture ; but the act of painting 
itself, of laying on the colours in the proper 
place, and proper quantity, was a much harder 
exercise than this alternate receding from and 
returning to the picture. This last would be 
rather a relaxation and relief than an effort. It 
is not to be wondered at, that an artist like Sir 
Joshua, who delighted so much in the sensual 
and practical part of his art, should have found 
himself at a considerable loss when the decay of 



ON THE PLEASURE OF PAINTING. 19 

his sight precluded him, for the last year or two 
of his life, from the following up of his pro- 
fession, — " the source," according to his own 
remark, " of thirty years uninterrupted enjoy- 
ment and prosperity to him." It is only those 
who never think at all, or else who have ac- 
customed themselves to brood incessantly on 
abstract ideas, that never feel ennui. 

To give one instance more, and then I will 
have done with this rambling discourse. One 
of my first attempts was a picture of my father, 
who was then in a green old age, with strong- 
marked features, and scarred with the small-pox. 
I drew it with a broad light crossing the face, 
looking down, with spectacles on, reading. The 
book was Shaftesbury's Characteristics, in a 
fine old binding, with Gribelin's etchings. My 
father would as lieve it had been any other 
book ; but for him to read was to be content, 
was " riches fineless." The sketch promised 
well ; and I set to work to finish it, determined 
to spare no time nor pains. My father was 
willing to sit as long as I pleased ; for there is 
a natural desire in the mind of man to sit for 
one's picture, to be the object of continued at- 
tention, to have one's likeness multiplied ; and 
besides his satisfaction in the picture, he had 
some pride in the artist, though he would rather 
» c 2 



20 ON THE .PLEASURE OF PAINTING. 

I should have written a sermon than painted 
like Rembrandt or like Raphael. Those winter 
days, with the gleams of sunshine coming 
through the chapel-windows, and cheered by 
the notes of the robin-redbreast in our garden 
(that " ever in the haunch of winter sings") 
— as my afternoon's work drew to a close, — were 
among the happiest of my life. When I gave 
the effect I intended to any part of the picture 
for which I had prepared my colours, when I 
imitated the roughness of the skin by a lucky 
stroke of the pencil, when I hit the clear pearly 
tone of a vein, when I gave the ruddy com- 
plexion of health, the blood circulating under 
the broad shadows of one side of the face, I 
thought my fortune made ; or rather it was 
already more than made, in my fancying that I 
might one day be able to say with Correggio, 
" / also am a painter!" It was an idle thought, 
a boy's conceit ; but it did not make me less 
happy at the time. I used regularly to set my 
work in the chair to look at it through the long 
evenings ; and many a time did I return to take 
leave of it before I could go to bed at night. I 
remember sending it with a throbbing heart to 
the Exhibition, and seeing it hung up there by 
the side of one of the Honourable Mr. Skeffing- 
ton (now Sir George). There was nothing in 



ON. THE PLEASURE OF PAINTING. 21 

common between them, but that they were the 
portraits of two very good-natured men. I 
think, but am not sure, that I finished this 
portrait (or another afterwards) on the same day 
that the news of the battle of Austerlitz came ; 
I walked out in the afternoon, and, as I returned, 
saw the evening star set over a poor man's 
cottage with other thoughts and feelings than I 
shall ever have again. Oh" for the revolution of 
the great Platonic year, that those times might 
come over again ! I could sleep out the three 
hundred and sixty-five thousand intervening 
years very contentedly ! — The picture is left : 
the table, the chair, the window where I learned 
to construe Livy, the chapel where my father 
preached, remain where they were; but he 
himself is gone to rest, full of years, of faith, of 
hope, and charity ! 



ESSAY II. 
THE SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED. 



ESSAY II 
THE SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED. 



The painter not only takes a delight in na- 
ture, he has a new and exquisite source of 
pleasure opened to him in the study and con- 
templation of works of art 

" Whate'er Lorraine light touch'd with soft'ning hue, 
Or savage Rosa dash'd, or learned Poussin drew." 

He turns aside to view a country-gentleman's 
seat with eager looks, thinking it may contain 
some of the rich products of art. There is an 
air round Lord Radnor's park, for there hang 
the two Claudes, the Morning and Evening of 
the Roman Empire — round Wilton-house, for 
there is Vandyke's picture of the Pembroke 
family — round Blenheim, for there is his picture 
of the Duke of Buckingham's children, and the 
most magnificent collection of Rubenses in the 
world — at Knowsley, for there is Rembrandt's 
Hand-writing on the Wall — and at Burleigh, 
for there are some of Guido's angelic heads. 



26 ON THE PLEASURE OF PAINTING. 

The young artist makes a pilgrimage to eaeh of 
these places, eyes them wistfully at a distance, 
"bosomed high in tufted trees/' and feels an 
interest in them of which the owner is scarce 
conscious : he enters the well-swept walks and 
echoing arch-ways, passes the threshold, is led 
through wainscoted rooms, is shown the fur- 
niture, the rich hangings, the tapestry, the 
massy services of plate — and, at last, is ushered 
into the room where his treasure is, the idol of 
his vows — some speaking face or bright land- 
scape ! It is stamped on his brain, and lives 
there thenceforward, a tally for nature, and a 
test of art. He furnishes out the chambers of 
the mind from the spoils of time, picks and 
chooses which shall have the best places — nearest 
his heart. He goes away richer than he came, 
richer than the possessor; and thinks that he 
may one day return, when he perhaps shall have 
done something like them, or even from failure 
shall have learned to admire truth and genius 
more. 

My first initiation in the mysteries of the art 
was at the Orleans Gallery : it was there I 
formed my taste, such as it is ; so that I am 
irreclaimably of the old school in painting. I 
was staggered when I saw the works there col- 
lected, and looked at them with wondering and 



ON THE PLEASURE OF PAINTING. #7 

with longing eyes. A mist passed away from 
my sight : the scales fell off. A new sense 
came upon me, a new heaven and a new earth 
stood before me. I saw the soul speaking in 
the face — " hands that the rod of empire had 
swayed" in mighty ages past — " a forked moun- 
tain or blue promontory," 



with trees upon 't 



That nod unto the world, and mock our eyes with air." 

Old Time had unlocked his treasures, and Fame 
stood portress at the door. We had all heard 
of the names of Titian, Raphael, Guido, Do- 
menichino, the Caracci — but to see them face 
to face, to be in the same room with their death- 
less productions, was like breaking some mighty 
spell — was almost an effect of necromancy ! 
From that time I lived in a world of pictures. 
Battles, sieges, speeches in parliament seemed 
mere idle noise and fury, " signifying nothing," 
compared with those mighty works and dreaded 
names that spoke to me in the eternal silence 
of thought. This was the more remarkable, as 
it was but a short time before that I was not 
only totally ignorant of, but insensible to the 
beauties of art. As an instance, I remember 
that one afternoon I was reading the Provoked 
Husband with the highest relish, with a green 



28 ON THE PLEASURE OF PAINTING. 

woody landscape of Ruysdael or Hobbima just 
before me, at which I looked off the book now 
and then, and wondered what there could be in 
that sort of work to satisfy or delight the mind 
— at the same time asking myself, as a specula- 
tive question, whether I should ever feel an 
interest in it like what I took in reading Van- 
brugh and Cibber? 

I had made some progress in painting when 
I went to the Louvre to study, and I never 
did any thing afterwards. I never shall forget 
conning over the Catalogue which a friend lent 
me just before I set out. The pictures, the 
names of the painters, seemed to relish in the 
mouth. There was one of Titian's Mistress at 
her toilette. Even the colours with which the 
painter had adorned her hair were not more 
golden, more amiable to sight, than those which 
played round and tantalised my fancy ere I saw 
the picture. There were two portraits by the 
same hand — " A young Nobleman with a glove" 
— Another, " a companion to it" — I read the 
description over and over with fond expectancy, 
and filled up the imaginary outline with what- 
ever I could conceive of grace, and dignity, and 
an antique gusto — all but equal to the original. 
There was the Transfiguration too. With what 
awe I saw it in my mind's eye, and was over- 



ON THE PLEASURE OF PAINTING. 29 

shadowed with the spirit of the artist ! Not to 
have been disappointed with these works after- 
wards, was the highest compliment I can pay to 
their transcendent merits. Indeed, it was from 
seeing other works of the same great masters that 
I had formed a vague, but no disparaging idea of 
these. — The first day I got there, I was kept for 
some time in the French Exhibition-room, and 
thought I should not be able to get a sight of 
the old masters. I just caught a peep at them 
through the door (vile hindrance !) like looking 
out of purgatory into paradise — from Poussin's 
noble mellow-looking landscapes to where Ru- 
bens hung out his gaudy banner, and down the 
glimmering vista to the rich jewels of Titian 
and the Italian school. At last, by much im- 
portunity, I was admitted, and lost not an in- 
stant in making use of my new privilege. — It 
was un beau jour to me. I marched delighted 
through a quarter of a mile of the proudest 
efforts of the mind of man, a whole creation of 
genius, a universe of art ! I ran the gauntlet of 
all the schools from the bottom to the top ; and 
in the «nd got admitted into the inner room, 
where they had been repairing some of their 
greatest works. Here the Transfiguration, the 
St. Peter Martyr, and the St. Jerome of Do- 
menichino stood on the floor, as if they had 



30 ON THE PLEASURE OF PAINTING. 






bent their knees, like camels stooping, to unlade 
their riches to the spectator. On one side, on 
an easel, stood Hippolito de Medici (a portrait 
by Titian) with a boar-spear in his hand, looking 
through those he saw, till you turned away 
from the keen glance : and thrown together in 
heaps were landscapes of the same hand, green 
pastoral hills and vales, and shepherds piping 
to their mild mistresses underneath the flower- 
ing shade. Reader, " if thou hast not seen the 
Louvre, thou art damned !" — for thou hast not 
seen the choicest remains of the works of art ; 
or thou hast not seen all these together, with 
their mutually reflected glories. I say nothing 
of the statues ; for I know but little of sculpture, 
and never liked any till I saw the Elgin marbles 
...Here, for four months together, I strolled and 
studied, and daily heard the warning sound — 
" Quatres keures passees, ilfautfermer, Citoyens" 
— (Ah ! why did they ever change their style ?) 
muttered in coarse provincial French; and 
brought away with me some loose draughts and 
fragments, which I have been forced to part 
with, like drops of life-blood, for " hard money." 
How often, thou tenantless mansion of godlike 
magnificence — how often has my heart since 
gone a pilgrimage to thee ! 

It has been made a question, whether the 



ON THE PLEASURE OF PAINTING. 31 

artist, or the mere man of taste and natural 
sensibility, receives most pleasure from the con- 
templation of works of art? and I think this 
question might be answered by another as a 
sort of experimentum cruets, namely, whether 
any one out of that "number numberless" of 
mere gentlemen and amateurs, who visited 
Paris at the period here spoken of, felt as much 
interest, as much pride or pleasure in this dis- 
play of the most striking monuments of art as 
the humblest student would? The first en- 
trance into the Louvre would be only one of the 
events of his journey, not an event in his life, 
remembered ever after with thankfulness and 
regret. He would explore it with the same un- 
meaning curiosity and idle wonder as he would 
the Regalia in the Tower, or the Botanic Garden 
in the Thuilleries, but not with the fond enthu- 
siasm of an artist. How should he ? His is 
" casual fruition, joyless, unendeared." But 
the painter is wedded to his art, the mistress, 
queen, and idol of his soul. He has embarked 
his all in it, fame, time, fortune, peace of mind, 
his hopes in youth, his consolation in age : and 
shall he not feel a more intense interest in 
whatever relates to it than the mere indolent 
trifler? Natural sensibility alone, without the 
entire application of the mind to that one ob- 



32 ON THE PLEASURE OF PAINTING. 

ject, will not enable the possessor to sympathise 
with all the degrees of beauty and power in the 
conceptions of a Titian or a Correggio ; but it 
is he only who does this, who follows them into 
all their force and matchless grace, that does or 
can feel their full value. Knowledge is plea- 
sure as well as power. No one but the artist 
who has studied nature and contended with the 
difficulties of art, can be aware of the beauties, 
or intoxicated with a passion for painting. No 
one who has not devoted his life and soul to 
the pursuit of art, can feel the same exultation 
in its brightest ornaments and loftiest triumphs 
which an artist does. Where the treasure is, 
there the heart is also. It is now seventeen 
years since I was studying in the Louvre (and 
I have long since given up all thoughts of the 
art as a profession), but long after I returned, 
and even still, I sometimes dream of being 
there again — of asking for the old pictures — 
and not finding th^m, or finding them changed 
or faded from what they were, I cry myself 
awake! What gentleman-amateur ever does 
this at such a distance of time, — that is, ever 
received pleasure or took interest enough in 
them to produce so lasting an impression ? 

But it is said that if a person had the same 
natural taste, and the same acquired knowledge 



ON THE PLEASURE OF PAINTING. 33 

as an artist, without the petty interests and 
technical notions, he would derive a purer plea- 
sure from seeing a fine portrait, a tine land- 
scape, and so on. This however. is not so 
much begging the question as asking an impos- 
sibility : he cannot have the same insight into 
the end without having studied the means ; nor 
the same love of art without the same habitual 
and exclusive attachment to it. Painters are, 
no doubt, often actuated by jealousy, partiality, 
and a sordid attention to that only which they 

find useful to themselves in painting. W 

has been seen poring over the texture of a 
Dutch cabinet-picture, so that he could not see 
the picture itself. But this is the perversion 
and pedantry of the profession, not its true 

or genuine spirit. If W had never looked 

at any thing but megilps and handling, he never 
would have put the soul of life and manners 
into his pictures, as he has done. Another 
objection is, that the instrumental parts of the 
art, the means, the first rudiments, paints, oils, 
and brushes, are painful and disgusting; and that 
the consciousness of the difficulty and anxiety 
with which perfection has been attained, must 
take away from the pleasure of the finest per- 
formance. This, however, is only an additional 
proof of the greater pleasure derived by the 

i) 



3<h ON THE PLEASURE OF PAINTING. 

artist from his profession ; for these things 
which are said to interfere with and destroy 
the common interest in works of art, do not 
disturb him ; he never once thinks of them, he 
is absorbed in the pursuit of a higher object ; 
he is intent, not on the means but the end ; he is 
taken up, not with the difficulties, but with the 
triumph over them. As in the case of the ana- 
tomist, who overlooks many things in the eager- 
ness of his search after abstract truth ; or the al- 
chemist who, while he is raking into his soot and 
furnaces, lives in a golden dream ; a lesser gives 
way to a greater object. But it is pretended 
that the painter may be supposed to submit to 
the unpleasant part of the process only for the 
sake of the fame or profit in view. So far is 
this from being a true state of the case, that I 
will venture to say, in the instance of a friend 
of mine who has lately succeeded in an import- 
ant undertaking in his art, that not all the fame 
he has acquired, not all the money he has re- 
ceived from thousands of admiring spectators, 
not all the newspaper puffs, — nor even the 
praise of the Edinburgh Review, — not all these, 
put together, ever gave him at any time the 
same genuine, undoubted satisfaction as any 
one half-hour employed in the ardent and pro- 
pitious pursuit of his art — in finishing to his 



ON THE PLEASURE OF PAINTING. 35 

heart's content a foot, a hand, or even a piece 
of drapery. What is the state of mind of 
an artist while he is at work ? He is then in 
the act of realising the highest idea he can 
form of beauty or grandeur : he conceives, he 
embodies that which he understands and loves 
best : that is, he is in full and perfect posses- 
sion of that which is to him the source of the 
highest happiness and intellectual excitement 
which he can enjoy. 

In short, as a conclusion to this argument, I 
will mention a circumstance which fell under 
my knowledge the other day. A friend had 
bought a print of Titian's Mistress, the same to 
which I have alluded above. He was anxious 
to shew it me on this account. I told him 
it was a spirited engraving, but it had not the 
look of the original. I believe he thought this 
fastidious, till I offered to shew him a rough 
sketch of it, which I had by me. Having seen 
this, he said he perceived exactly what I meant, 
and could not bear to Jook at the print after- 
wards. He had good sense enough to see the 
difference in the individual instance ; but a 
person better acquainted with Titian's manner 
and with art in general, that is, of a more cul- 
tivated and refined taste, would know that it 
was a bad print, without having any immediate 

D 2 



36 ON THE PLEASURE OF PAINTING. 

model to compare it with. He would perceive 
with a glance of the eye, with a sort of in- 
stinctive feeling, that it was hard, and without 
that bland, expansive, and nameless expression 
which always distinguished Titian's most famous 
works. Any one who is accustomed to a head 
in a picture can never reconcile himself to a 
print from it: but to the ignorant they are 
both the same. To a vulgar eye there is no 
difference between a Guido and a daub, be- 
tween a penny-print or the vilest scrawl, and 
the most finished performance. In other words, 
all that excellence which lies between these two 
extremes, — all, at least, that marks the excess 
above mediocrity, — all that constitutes true 
beauty, harmony, refinement, grandeur, is lost 
upon the common observer. But it is from 
this point that the delight, the glowing raptures 
of the true adept commence. An uninformed 
spectator may like an ordinary drawing better 
than the ablest connoisseur ; but for that very 
reason he cannot like the highest specimens of 
art so well. The refinements not only of exe- 
cution but of truth and nature are inaccessible 
to unpractised eyes. The exquisite gradations 
in a sky of Claude's are not perceived by such 
persons, and consequently the harmony cannot 
be felt. Where there is no conscious appre- 



ON THE PLEASURE OF PAINTING. SJ 

hension, there can be no conscious pleasure. 
Wonder at the first sight of works of art may be 
the effect of ignorance and novelty; but real 
admiration and permanent delight in them are 
the growth of taste and knowledge. " I would 
not wish to have your eyes," said a good-natured 
man to a critic, who was finding fault with a 
picture, in which the other saw no blemish. 
Why so ? The idea which prevented him from 
admiring this inferior production was a higher 
idea of truth and beauty which was ever present 
with him, and a continual source of pleasing 
and lofty contemplations. It may be different 
in a taste for outward luxuries and the priva- 
tions of mere sense ; but the idea of perfection, 
which acts as an intellectual foil, is always an 
addition, a support, and a proud consolation ! 

Richardson, in his Essays which ought to be 
better known, has left some striking examples 
of the felicity and infelicity of artists, both as it 
relates to their external fortune, and to the 
practice of their art. In speaking of the know- 
ledge of hands, he exclaims — " When one is con- 
sidering a picture or a drawing, one at the same 
time thinks this was done by him* who had 
many extraordinary endowments of body and 

* Leonardo da Vinci. 



38 ON THE PLEASURE OF PAINTING. 

mind, but was withal very capricious ; who was 
honoured in life and death, expiring in the 
arms of one of the greatest princes of that age, 
Francis I. King of France, who loved him as a 
friend. Another is of him* who lived a long 
and happy life, beloved of Charles V. emperour ; 
and many others of the first princes of Europe. 
When one has another in hand, we think this 
was done by one -j* who so excelled in three arts, 
as that any of them in that degree had rendered 
him worthy of immortality; and one moreover 
that durst contend with his sovereign (one of 
the haughtiest popes that ever was) upon a 
slight offered to him, and extricated himself 
with honour. Another is the work of him J 
who, without any one exterior advantage but 
mere strength of genius, had the most sublime 
imaginations, and executed them accordingly, 
yet lived and died obscurely. Another we shall 
consider as the work of him§ who restored 
Painting when it had almost sunk ; of him whom 
art made honourable, but who neglecting and 
despising greatness with a sort of cynical pride, 
was treated suitably to the figure he gave him- 
self, not his intrinsic worth ; which, not having 
philosophy enough to bear it, broke his heart. 

* Titian. f Michael Angelo. J Correggio. 

§ Annibal Caracci. 



ON THE PLEASURE OF PAINTING. 3() 

Another is done by one # who (on the contrary) 
was a fine gentleman and lived in great magni- 
ficence, and was much honoured by his own and 
foreign princes ; who was a courtier, a states- 
man, and a painter ; and so much all these, that 
when he acted in either character, that seemed 
to be his business, and the others his diversion. 
I say when one thus reflects, besides the plea- 
sure arising from the beauties and excellences 
of the work, the fine ideas it gives us of natural 
things, the noble way of thinking it may suggest 
to us, an additional pleasure results from the 
above considerations. But, oh ! the pleasure, 
when a connoisseur and lover of art has before 
him a picture or drawing, of which he can say 
this is the hand, these are the thoughts of him t 
who was one of the politest, best-natured gentle- 
men that ever was ; and beloved and assisted 
by the greatest wits and the greatest men then 
in Rome : of him who lived in great fame, ho- 
nour, and magnificence, and died extremely 
lamented; and missed a Cardinal's hat only by 
dying a few months too soon ; but was par- 
ticularly esteemed and favoured by two Popes, 
the only ones who filled the chair of St. Peter 
in his time, and as great men as ever sat t he re 

* Rubens. f Rafaelle. 



40 ON THE PLEASURE OF PAINTING. 

since that apostle, if at least he ever did : one, 
in short, who could have been a Leonardo, a 
Michael Angelo, a Titian, a Correggio, a Par- 
megiano, an Annibal, a Rubens, or any other 
whom he pleased, but none of them could ever 
have been a Rafaeile." Page 251. 

The same writer speaks feelingly of the change 
in the style of diner ent artists from their change 
of fortune, and as the circumstances are little 
known, I will quote the passage relating to two 
of them. 

" Guido Reni from a prince-like affluence of 
fortune (the just reward of his angelic works) 
fell to a condition like that of a hired servant to 
one who supplied him with money for what he 
did at a fixed rate ; and that by his being be- 
witched with a passion for gaming, whereby he 
lost vast sums of money ; and even what he got in 
this his state of servitude by day, he commonly 
lost at night : nor could he ever be cured of 
this cursed madness. Those of his works, there- 
fore, which he did in this unhappy part of his 
life, may easily be conceived to be in a different 
style to what he did before, which in some things, 
that is, in the airs of his heads (in the gracious 
kind) had a delicacy in them peculiar to himself, 
and almost more than human. But I must not 
multiply instances. Parmegiano is one that 



ON THE PLEASURE OF PAINTING. 41 

alone takes in all the several kinds of variation, 
and all the degrees of goodness, from the lowest 
of the indifferent up to the sublime. I can pro- 
duce evident proofs of this in so easy a grada- 
tion, that one cannot deny but that he that did 
this, might do that, and very probably did so ; 
and thus one may ascend and descend, like the 
angels on Jacob's ladder, whose foot was upon 
the earth, but its top reached to Heaven. 

" And this great man had his unlucky cir- 
cumstance : he became mad after the philo- 
sopher's stone, and did but very little in paint- 
ing or drawing afterwards. Judge what that 
was, and whether there was not an alteration of 
style from what he had done, before this devil 
possessed him. His creditors endeavoured to 
exorcise him, and did him some good, for he set 
himself to work again in his own way : but if a 
drawing I have of a Lucretia be that he made 
for his last picture, as it probably is (Vasari 
says that was the subject of it) it is an evident 
proof of his decay : it is good indeed, but it 
wants much of the delicacy which is commonly 
seen in his works \ and so I always thought be- 
fore I knew or imagined it to be done in this 
his ebb of genius." Page 153. 

We have had two artists of our own country, 
whose fate has been as singular as it was hard: 
Gandy was a portrait-painter in the beginning 



42 ON THE PLEASURE OF PAINTING. 

of the last century, whose heads were said to 
have come near to Rembrandt's, and he was the 
undoubted prototype of Sir Joshua Reynolds's 
style. Yet his name has scarcely been heard 
of; and his reputation, like his works, never 
extended beyond his own county. What did 
he think of himself and of a fame so bounded ! 
Did he ever dream he was indeed an artist? 
Or how did this feeling in him differ from the 
vulgar conceit of the lowest pretender? The best 
known of his works is a portrait of an alderman 
of Exeter, in some public building in that city. 
Poor Dan. Stringer ! Forty years ago he had 
the finest hand and the clearest eye. of any artist 
of his time, and produced heads and drawings 
that would not have disgraced a brighter period 
in the art. But he fell a martyr (like Burns) to 
the society of country-gentlemen, and then of 
those whom they would consider as more his 
equals. I saw him many years ago when he 
treated the masterly sketches he had by him 
(one in particular of the group of citizens in 
Shakespear " swallowing the tailor's news") as 
"bastards of his genius, not his children;" and 
seemed to have given up all thoughts of his art. 
Whether he is since dead, I cannot say : the 
world do not so much as know that he ever 
lived ! 



ESSAY III. 
ON THE PAST AND FUTURE. 



ESSAY III. 

ON THE PAST AND FUTURE. 



I have naturally but little imagination, and 
am not of a very sanguine turn of mind. I have 
some desire to enjoy the present good, and 
some fondness for the past; but I am not at 
all given to building castles in the air, nor to 
look forward with much confidence or hope to 
the brilliant illusions held out by the future. 
Hence I have perhaps been led to form a 
theory, which is very contrary to the common 
notions and feelings on the subject, and which 
I will here try to explain as well as I can. — When 
Sterne in the Sentimental Journey told the 
French Minister that if the French people had 
a fault, it was that they were too serious, the 
latter replied that if that was his opinion, he 
must defend it with all his might, for he would 
have all the world against him; so I shall have 
enough to do to get well through the present 
argument. 

I cannot see, then, any rational or logical 
ground for that mighty difference in the value 



46 ON THE PAST AND FUTURE. 

which mankind generally set upon the past and 
future, as if the one was every thing, and the 
other nothing, of no consequence whatever. 
On the other hand, I conceive that the past is 
as real and substantial a part of our being, that 
it is as much a bonajide, undeniable consider- 
ation in the estimate of human life, as the 
future can possibly be. To say that the past is 
of no importance, unworthy of a moment's re- 
gard, because it has gone by, and is no longer 
any thing, is an argument that cannot be held 
to any purpose : for if the past has ceased to 
be, and is therefore to be accounted nothing in 
the scale of good or evil, the future is yet to 
come, and has never been any thing. Should 
any one choose to assert that the present only 
is of any value in a strict and positive sense, 
because that alone has a real existence, that we 
should seize the instant good, and give all else 
to the winds, I can understand what he means 
(though perhaps he does not himself*) : but I 
cannot comprehend how this distinction be- 

* If we take away from the present the moment that is 
just gone by and the moment that is next to come, how 
much of it will be left for this plain, practical theory to rest 
upon ? Their solid basis of sense and reality will reduce 
itself to a pin's point, a hair-line, on which our moral 
balance-masters will have some difficulty to maintain their 
footing without falling over on either side. 



ON THE PAST AND FUTURE. 47 

tween that which has a downright and sensible, 
and that which has only a remote and airy 
existence, can be applied to establish the prefer- 
ence of the future over the past ; for both are 
in this point of view equally ideal, absolutely 
nothing, except as they are conceived of by the 
mind's eye, and are thus rendered present to 
the thoughts and feelings. Nay, the one is 
even more imaginary, a more fantastic creature 
of the brain than the other, and the interest we 
take in it more shadowy and gratuitous ; for 
the future, on which we lay so much stress, 
may never come to pass at all, that is, may 
never be embodied into actual existence in the 
whole course of events, whereas the past has 
certainly existed once, has received the stamp 
of truth, and left an image of itself behind. It 
is so far then placed beyond the possibility of 
doubt, or as the poet has it, 

" Those joys are lodg'd beyond the reach of fate." 

It is not, however, attempted to be denied that 
though the future is nothing at present, and 
has no immediate interest while we are speak- 
ing, yet it is of the utmost consequence in it- 
self, and of the utmost interest to the indi- 
vidual, because it will have a real existence, and 
we have an idea of it as existing in time to 



48 ON THE PAST AND FUTURE. 

come. Well then, the past also has no real 
existence ; the actual sensation and the interest 
belonging to it are both fled ; but it has had 
a real existence, and we can still call up a vivid 
recollection of it as having once been ; and 
therefore, by parity of reasoning, it is not a 
thing perfectly insignificant in itself, nor wholly 
indifferent to the mind, whether it ever was or 
not. Oh no ! Far from it ! Let us not rashly 
quit our hold upon the past, when perhaps 
there may be little else left to bind us to exist- 
ence. Is it nothing to have been, and to have 
been happy or miserable ? Or is it a matter of 
no moment to think whether I have been one 
or the other ? Do I delude myself, do I build 
upon a shadow or a dream, do I dress up in the 
gaudy garb of idleness and folly a pure fiction, 
with nothing answering to it in the universe of 
things and the records of truth, when I look 
back with fond delight or with tender regret to 
that which was at one time to me my all, when 
I revive the glowing image of some bright 
reality, 

" The thoughts of which can never from my heart ?" 

Do I then muse on nothing, do I bend my 
eyes on nothing, when I turn back in fancy to 
" those suns and skies so pure" that lighted up 



ON THE PAST AND FUTURE. 49 

my early path ? Is it to think of nothing, to 
set an idle value upon nothing, to think of all 
that has happened to me, and of all that can 
ever interest me ? Or, to use the language of a 
fine poet (who is himself among my earliest 
and not least painful recollections) — 

" What though the radiance which was once so bright 

Be now for ever vanish'd from my sight, 

Though nothing can bring back the hour 

Of glory in the grass, of splendour in the flow'r" — 

yet am I mocked with a lie, when I venture to 
think of it ? Or do I not drink in and breathe 
again the air of heavenly truth, when I but "re- 
trace its footsteps, and its skirts far off adore?" 
I cannot say with the same poet — ■ 

" And see how dark the backward stream, 
A little moment past so smiling" — 

for it is the past that gives me most delight 
and most assurance of reality. What to me 
constitutes the great charm of the Confessions 
of Rousseau is their turning so much upon this 
feeling. He seems to gather up the past mo- 
ments of his being like drops of honey-dew to 
distil a precious liquor from them ; his alternate 
pleasures and pains are the bead-roll that he 
tells over, and piously worships ; he makes a 
rosary of the flowers of hope and fancy that 

E 



50 ON THE PAST AND FUTURE* 

strewed his earliest years. When he begins 
the last of the Reveries of a Solitary Walker, 
" II y a argourdhui, jour des Pdques Fleuris, 
cinquante arts depuis quejai premier "vu Madame 
War ens" what a yearning of the soul is im- 
plied in that short sentence ! Was all that had 
happened to him, all that he had thought and 
felt in that sad interval of time, to be accounted 
nothing ? Was that long, dim, faded retrospect 
of years happy or miserable, a blank that was 
not to make his eyes fail and his heart faint 
within him in trying to grasp all that had once 
filled it and that had since vanished, because it 
was not a prospect into futurity ? Was he wrong 
in finding more to interest him in it than in the 
next fifty years — which he did not live to see ; 
or if he had, what then? Would they have 
been worth thinking of, compared with the 
times of his youth, of his first meeting with 
Madame Warens, with those times which he 
has traced with such truth and pure delight 
" in our heart's tables?" When "all the life 
of life was flown," was he not to live the first 
and best part of it over again, and once more be 
all that he then was ? — Ye woods that crown the 
clear lone brow of Norman Court, why do I re- 
visit ye so oft, and feel a soothing consciousness 
of your presence, but that your high tops waving 



ON THE PAST AND FUTURE. 51 

in the wind recal to me the hours and years 
that are for ever fled, that ye renew in ceaseless 
murmurs the story of long-cherished hopes and 
bitter disappointment, that in your solitudes 
and tangled wilds I can wander and lose myself 
as I wander on and am lost in the solitude 
of my own heart ; and that as your rustling 
branches give the loud blast to the waste below 
— borne on the thoughts of other years, I can 
look down with patient anguish at the cheerless 
desolation which I feel within ! Without that 
face pale as the primrose with hyacinthine locks, 
for ever shunning and for ever haunting me, 
mocking my waking thoughts as in a dream, 
without that smile which my heart could never 
turn to scorn, without those eyes dark with 
their own lustre, still bent on mine, and draw- 
ing the soul into their liquid mazes like a sea of 
love, without that name trembling in fancy's 
ear, without that form gliding before me like 
Oread or Dryad in fabled groves, what should 
I do, how pass away the listless leaden-footed 
hours ? Then wave, wave on, ye woods of Tu- 
derley, and lift your high tops in the air ; my 
sighs and vows uttered by your mystic voice 
breathe into me my former being, and enable 
me to bear the thing I am ! — The objects that 
we have known in better days are the main 

p O 

1* At 



52 ON THE PAST AND FUTURE. 

props that sustain the weight of our affections, 
and give us strength to await our future lot. 
The future is like a dead wall or a thick mist 
hiding all objects from our view : the past is 
alive and stirring with objects, bright or solemn, 
and of unfading interest. What is it in fact 
that we recur to oftenest? What subjects do 
we think or talk of? Not the ignorant future, 
but the well-stored past. Othello, the Moor of 
Venice, amused himself and his hearers at the 
house of Signor Brabantio by " running through 
the story of his life even from his boyish days ;" 
and oft " beguiled them of their tears, when he 
did speak of some disastrous stroke which his 
youth suffered." This plan of ingratiating him- 
self would not have answered, if the past had 
been, like the contents of an old almanac, of no 
use but to be thrown aside and forgotten. What 
a blank, for instance, does the history of the world 
for the next six thousand years present to the 
mind, compared with that of the last ! All that 
strikes the imagination or excites any interest 
in the mighty scene is "what has been * / 

* A treatise on the Millennium is dull ; but who was ever 
weary of reading the fables of the Golden Age? On my once 
observing I should like to have been Claude, a person said, 
" they should not, For that then by this time it would have 
been all over with them." As if it could possibly signify when 



ON THE PAST AND FUTURE. 53 

Neither in itself then, nor as a subject of 
general contemplation, has the future any ad- 
vantage over the past. But with respect to our 
grosser passions and pursuits it has. As far as 
regards the appeal to the understanding or the 
imagination, the past is just as good, as real, of 
as much intrinsic and ostensible value as the 
future : but there is another principle in the 
human mind, the principle of action or will ; 
and of this the past has no hold, the future en- 
grosses it entirely to itself. It is this strong 
lever of the affections that gives so powerful a 
bias to our sentiments on this subject, and 
violently transposes the natural order of our 
associations. We regret the pleasures we have 
lost, and eagerly anticipate those which are to 
come : we dwell with satisfaction on the evils 
from which we have escaped (Posthcec meminisse 
iuvabif) — and dread future pain. The good 
that is past is in this sense like money that is 
spent, which is of no further use, and about 
which we give ourselves little concern. The 
good we expect is like a store yet untouched, 

we live (save and excepting the present minute), or as if the 
value of human life decreased or increased with successive 
centuries. At that rate, we had better have our life still to 
come at some future period, and so postpone our existence 
century after century ad infinitum. 



54 ON THE PAST AND FUTURE. 

and in the enjoyment of which we promise our- 
selves infinite gratification. What has happened 
to us we think of no consequence : what is to 
happen to us, of the greatest. Why so? Simply 
because the one is still in our power, and the 
other not — because the efforts of the will to 
bring any object to pass or to prevent it 
strengthen our attachment or aversion to that 
object — because the pains and attention be- 
stowed upon any thing add to our interest in it, 
and because the habitual and earnest pursuit of 
any end redoubles the ardour of our expecta- 
tions, and converts the speculative and indolent 
satisfaction we might otherwise feel in it into 
real passion. Our regrets, anxiety, and wishes 
are thrown away upon the past: but the in- 
sisting on the importance of the future is of 
the utmost use in aiding our resolutions, and 
stimulating our exertions. If the future were 
no more amenable to our wills than the past; if 
our precautions, our sanguine schemes, our 
hopes and fears were of as little avail in the one 
case as the other ; if we could neither soften 
our minds to pleasure, nor steel our fortitude to 
the resistance of pain beforehand; if all objects 
drifted along by us like straws or pieces of wood 
in a river, the will being purely passive, and as 
little able to avert the future as to arrest the 



ON THE PAST AND FUTURE. 55 

past, we should in that case be equally in- 
different to both ; that is, we should consider 
each as they affected the thoughts and imagina- 
tion with certain -sentiments of approbation or 
regret, but without the importunity of action, 
the irritation of the will, throwing the whole 
weight of passion and prejudice into one scale, 
and leaving the other quite empty. While the 
blow is coming, we prepare to meet it, we think 
to ward off or break its force, we arm ourselves 
with patience to endure what cannot be avoided, 
we agitate ourselves with fifty needless alarms 
about it ; but when the blow is struck, the pang 
is over, the struggle is no longer necessary, and 
we cease to harass or torment ourselves about it 
more than we can help. It is not that the one 
belongs to the future and the other to time past ; 
but that the one is a subject of action, of uneasy 
apprehension, of strong passion, and that the 
other has passed wholly out of the sphere of 
action, into the region of 

" Calm contemplation and majestic pains*." 

It would not give a man more concern to know 

* In like manner, though we know that an event must 
have taken place at a distance, long before we can hear 
the result, yet as long as we remain in ignorance of it, we 
irritate ourselves about it, and suffer all the agonies of sus- 



56 ON THE PAST AND FUTURE. 

that he should be put to the rack a year hence, 
than to recollect that he had been put to it a 
year ago, but that he hopes to avoid the one, 
whereas he must sit down patiently under the 
consciousness of the other. In this hope he 
wears himself out in vain struggles with fate, 
and puts himself to the rack of his imagination 
every day he has to live in the mean while. 
When the event is so remote or so independent 
of the will as to set aside the necessity of im- 
mediate action, or to baffle all attempts to defeat 
it, it gives us little more disturbance or emotion 
than if it had already taken place, or were some- 
thing to happen in another state of being, or to 
an indifferent person. Criminals are observed 
to grow more anxious as their trial approaches ; 
but after their sentence is passed, they become 
tolerably resigned, and generally sleep sound the 
night before its execution. 

It in some measure confirms this theory, that 
men attach more or less importance to past and 
future events, according as they are more or less 
engaged in action and the busy scenes of life. 
Those who have a fortune to make or are in 
pursuit of rank and power think little of the 

pense, as if it was still to come; but as soon as our un- 
certainty is removed, our fretful impatience vanishes, we 
resign ourselves to fate, and make up our minds to what has 
happened as well as we can. 



ON THE TAST AND FUTURE. 6J 

past, for it does not contribute greatly to their 
views : those who have nothing to do but to 
think, take nearly the same interest in the past 
as in the future. The contemplation of the one 
is as delightful and real as that of the other. 
The season of hope has an end ; but the remem- 
brance of it is left. The past still lives in the 
memory of those who have leisure to look back 
upon the way that they have trod, and can from 
it " catch glimpses that may make them less 
forlorn." The turbulence of action, and un- 
easiness of desire, must point to the future : it is 
only in the quiet innocence of shepherds, in the 
simplicity of pastoral ages, that a tomb was 
found with this inscription— " i also was an 

ARCADIAN !" 

Though I by no means think that our habitual 
attachment to life is in exact proportion to the 
value of the gift, yet I am not one of those 
splenetic persons who affect to think it of no 
value at all. Que peu de chose est la vie hu- 
maine — is an exclamation in the mouths of mo- 
ralists and philosophers, to which I cannot 
agree. It is little, it is short, it is not worth 
having, if we take the last hour, and leave out 
all that has gone before, which has been one 
way of looking at the subject. Such calcu- 
lators seem to say that life is nothing when it is 



58 ON THE PAST AND FUTURE. 

over, and that may in their sense be true. If 
the old rule — Respice Jinem — were to be made 
absolute, and no one could be pronounced for- 
tunate till the day of his death, there are few 
among us whose existence would, upon those 
conditions, be much to be envied. But this is 
not a fair view of the case. A man's life is his 
whole life, not the last glimmering snuff of the 
candle ; and this, I say, is considerable, and not 
a little matter, whether we regard its pleasures 
or its pains. To draw a peevish conclusion to 
the contrary from our own superannuated de- 
sires or forgetful indifference is about as reason- 
able as to say, a man never was young because 
he is grown old, or never lived because he is 
now dead. The length or agreeableness of a 
journey does not depend on the few last steps 
of it, nor is the size of a building to be judged 
of from the last stone that is added to it. It 
is neither the first nor last hour of our exist- 
ence, but the space that parts these two — not 
our exit nor our entrance upon the stage, but 
what we do, feel, and think while there — that 
we are to attend to in pronouncing sentence 
upon it. Indeed it would be easy to shew 
that it is the very extent of human life, the 
infinite number of things contained in it, its 
contradictory and fluctuating interests, the trail- 



ON THE PAST AND FUTURE. 59 

sition from one situation to another, the hours, 
months, years spent in one fond pursuit after 
another ; that it is, in a word, the length of our 
common journey and the quantity of events 
crowded into it, that, baffling the grasp of our 
actual perception, make it slide from our 
memory, and dwindle into nothing in its own 
perspective. It is too mighty for us, and we 
say it is nothing ! It is a speck in our fancy, 
and yet what canvas w r ould be big enough to 
hold its striking groups, its endless subjects ! 
It is light as vanity, and yet if all its weary mo- 
ments, if all its head and heart aches were com- 
pressed into one, what fortitude would not be 
overwhelmed with the blow T ! What a huge 
heap, a "huge, dumb heap," of wishes, thoughts, 
feelings, anxious cares, soothing hopes, loves, 
joys, friendships, it is composed of! How many 
ideas and trains of sentiment, long and deep 
and intense, often pass through the mind in 
only one day's thinking or reading, for instance! 
How many such days are there in a year, how 
many years in a long life, still occupied with 
something interesting, still recalling some old 
impression, still recurring to some difficult ques- 
tion and making progress in it, every step ac- 
companied with a sense of power, and every 
moment conscious of " the high endeavour or 



60 ON THE PAST AND FUTURE. 

the glad success ;" for the mind seizes only on 
that which keeps it employed, and is wound up 
to a certain pitch of pleasurable excitement or 
lively solicitude, by the necessity of its own na- 
ture. The division of the map of life into its 
component parts is beautifully made by King 
Henry VI. 

" Oh God ! methinks it were a happy life 

To be no better than a homely swain, 

To sit upon a hill as I do now, 

To carve out dials quaintly, point by point, 

Thereby to see the minutes how they run; 

How many make the hour full complete, 

How many hours bring about the day, 

How many days will finish up the year, 

How many years a mortal man may live : 

When this is known, then to divide the times ; 

Sp many hours must I tend my flock, 

So many hours must I take my rest, 

So many hours must I contemplate, 

So many hours must I sport myself; 

So many days my ewes have been with young, 

So many weeks ere the poor fools will yean, 

So many months ere I shall shear the fleece : 

So many minutes, hours, weeks, months, and years 

Past over to the end they were created, 

Would bring grey hairs unto a quiet grave." 

I myself am neither a king nor a shepherd : 
hooks have been my fleecy charge, and my 
thoughts have been my subjects. But these 



ON THE PAST AND FUTURE. 6 1 

have found me sufficient employment at the 
time, and enough to think of for the time to 
come. — 

The passions contract and warp the natural 
progress of life. They paralyse all of it that is 
not devoted to their tyranny and caprice. This 
makes the difference between the laughing in- 
nocence of childhood, the pleasantness of youth, 
and the crabbedness of age. A load of cares 
lies like a weight of guilt upon the mind : so 
that a man of business often has all the air, the 
distraction and restlessness and hurry of feeling 
of a criminal. A knowledge of the world takes 
away the freedom and simplicity of thought as 
effectually as the contagion of its example. The 
artlessness and candour of our early years are 
open to all impressions alike, because the mind 
is not clogged and pre-occupied with other ob- 
jects. Our pleasures and our pains come single, 
make room for one another, and the spring of 
the mind is fresh and unbroken, its aspect clear 
and unsullied. Hence " the tear forgot as soon 
shed, the sunshine of the breast." But as we 
advance farther, the will gets greater head. We 
form violent antipathies and indulge exclusive 
preferences. We make up our minds to some 
one thing, and if we cannot have that, will have 
nothing. We are wedded to opinion, to fancy, 



62 ON THE PAST AND FUTURE. 

to prejudice ; which destroys the soundness of 
our judgments, and the serenity and buoyancy 
of our feelings. The chain of habit coils itself 
round the heart, like a serpent, to gnaw and stifle 
it. It grows rigid and callous ; and for the soft- 
ness and elasticity of childhood, full of proud 
flesh and obstinate tumours. The violence and 
perversity of our passions comes in more and 
more to overlay our natural sensibility and well- 
grounded affections ; and we screw ourselves 
up to aim only at those things which are neither 
desirable nor practicable. Thus life passes 
away in the feverish irritation of pursuit and the 
certainty of disappointment. By degrees, no- 
thing but this morbid state of feeling satisfies 
us : and all common pleasures and cheap amuse- 
ments are sacrificed to the demon of ambition, 
avarice, or dissipation. The machine is over- 
wrought . the parching heat of the veins dries 
up and withers the flowers of Love, Hope, and 
Joy ; and any pause, any release from the rack 
of ecstasy on which we are stretched, seems 
more insupportable than the pangs which we 
endure. We are suspended between torment- 
ing desires, and the horrors of ennui. The im- 
pulse of the will, like the wheels of a carriage 
going down hill, becomes too strong for the 
driver, reason, and cannot be stopped nor kept 



ON THE PAST AND FUTURE. 63 

within bounds. Some idea, some fancy, takes 
possession of the brain ; and however ridiculous, 
however distressing, however ruinous, haunts 
us by a sort of fascination through life. 

Not only is this principle of excessive irrita- 
bility to be seen at work in our more turbulent 
passions and pursuits, but even in the formal 
study of arts and sciences, the same thing takes 
place, and undermines the repose and happiness 
of life. The eagerness of pursuit overcomes 
the satisfaction to result from the accomplish- 
ment. The mind is overstrained to attain its 
purpose ; and when it is attained, the ease and 
alacrity necessary to enjoy it are gone. The 
irritation of action does not cease and go down 
with the occasion for it ; but we are first uneasy 
to get to the end of our work, and then uneasy 
for want of something to do. The ferment of 
the brain does not of itself subside into pleasure 
and soft repose. Hence the disposition to strong 
stimuli observable in persons of much intellectual 
exertion to allay and carry off the over-excite- 
ment. The improvi safari poets (it is recorded 
by Spence in his Anecdotes of Pope) cannot 
sleep after an evening's continued display of 
their singular and difficult art. The rhymes 
keep running in their head in spite of themselves, 
and will not let them rest. Mechanics and la- 



64 ON THE PAST AND FUTURE. 

bouring people never know what to do with 
themselves. on a Sunday, though they return to 
their work with greater spirit for the relief, and 
look forward to it with pleasure all the week. 
Sir Joshua Reynolds was never comfortable out 
of his painting-room, and died of chagrin and 
regret, because he could not paint on to the 
last moment of his life. He used to say that 
he could go on retouching a picture for ever, as 
long as it stood on his easel ; but as soon as it 
was once fairly out of the house, he never wished 
to see it again. An ingenious artist of our own 
time has been heard to declare, that if ever the 
Devil got him into his clutches, he would set 
him to copy his own pictures. Thus the secure, 
self-complacent retrospect to what is done is 
nothing, while the anxious, uneasy looking for- 
ward to what is to come is every thing. We are 
afraid to dwell upon the past, lest it should 
retard our future progress ; the indulgence of 
ease is fatal to excellence ; and to succeed in 
life, we lose the ends of being ! 



ESSAY IV. 
ON GENIUS AND COMMON SENSE. 



ESSAY IV. 
ON GENIUS AND COMMON SENSE. 



We hear it maintained by people of more 
gravity than understanding, that genius and 
taste are strictly reducible to rules, and that 
there is a rule for every thing. So far is it from 
being true that the finest breath of fancy is a 
definable thing, that the plainest common sense 
is only what Mr. Locke would have called a 
mixed mode, subject to a particular sort of ac- 
quired and undefmable tact. It is asked, " If 
you do not know the rule by which a thing is 
done, how can you be sure of doing it a second 
time ?" And the answer is, " If you do not 
know the muscles by the help of which you 
walk, how is it you do not fall down at every 
step you take?" In art, in taste, in life, in 
speech, you decide from feeling, and not from 
reason ; that is, from the impression of a num- 
ber of things on the mind, which impression is 
true and well-founded, though you may not be 
able to analyse or account for it in the several 

f 2 



68 ON GENIUS AND COMMON SENSE. 

particulars. In a gesture you use, in a look 
you see, in a tone you hear, you judge of the 
expression, propriety, and meaning from habit, 
not from reason or rules ; that is to say, from 
innumerable instances of like gestures, looks, 
and tones, in innumerable other circumstances, 
variously modified, which are too many and too 
refined to be all distinctly recollected, but which 
do not therefore operate the less powerfully upon 
the mind and eye of taste. Shall we say that 
these impressions (the immediate stamp of na- 
ture) do not operate in a given manner till they 
are classified and reduced to rules, or is not the 
rule itself grounded upon the truth and cer- 
tainty of that natural operation? How then 
can the distinction of the understanding as to 
the manner in which they operate be necessary 
to their producing their due and uniform effect 
upon the mind? If certain effects did not 
regularly arise out of certain causes in mind as 
well as matter, there could be no rule given 
for them : nature does not follow the rule, but 
suggests it. Reason is the interpreter and critic 
of nature and genius, not their lawgiver and 
judge. He must be a poor creature indeed 
whose practical convictions do not in almost all 
cases outrun his deliberate understanding, or 
who does not feel and know much more than he 



ON GENIUS AND COMMON SENSE. 6Q 

can give a reason for. — Hence the distinction 
between eloquence and wisdom, between in- 
genuity and common sense. A man may be 
dextrous and able in explaining the grounds 
of his opinions, and yet may be a mere sophist, 
because he only sees one half of a subject. 
Another may feel the whole weight of a ques- 
tion, nothing relating to it may be lost upon him, 
and yet he may be able to give no account of the 
manner in which it affects him, or to drag his 
reasons from their silent lurking-places. This 
last will be a wise man, though neither a logician 
nor rhetorician. Goldsmith was a fool to Dr. 
Johnson in argument ; that is, in assigning the 
specific grounds of his opinions : Dr. Johnson 
was a fool to Goldsmith in the fine tact, the 
airy, intuitive faculty with which he skimmed 
the surfaces of things, and unconsciously formed 
his opinions. Common sense is the just result 
of the sum-total of such unconscious impressions 
in the ordinary occurrences of life, as they are 
treasured up in the memory, and called out by 
the occasion. Genius and taste depend much 
upon the same principle exercised on loftier 
ground and in more unusual combinations. 

I am glad to shelter myself from the charge 
of affectation or singularity in this view of 
an often debated but ill-understood point, by 



70 ON GENIUS AND COMMON SENSE. 

quoting a passage from Sir Joshua Reynolds's 
Discourses, which is full, and, I think, conclu- 
sive to the purpose. He says, 

" I observe, as a fundamental ground common 
to all the Arts with which we have any concern 
in this Discourse, that they address themselves 
only to two faculties of the mind, its imagina- 
tion and its sensibility. 

" All theories which attempt to direct or to 
control the Art, upon any principles falsely 
called rational, which we form to ourselves upon 
a supposition of what ought in reason to be the 
end or means of Art, independent of the known 
first effect produced by objects on the imagina- 
tion, must be false and delusive. For though 
it may appear bold to say it, the imagination is 
here the residence of truth. If the imagination 
be affected, the conclusion is fairly drawn ; if it 
be not affected, the reasoning is erroneous, be- 
cause the end is not obtained ; the effect itself 
being the test, and the only test, of the truth 
and efficacy of the means. 

" There is in the commerce of life, as in Art, 
a sagacity which is far from being contradictory 
to right reason, and is superior to any occasional 
exercise of that faculty ; which supersedes it ; 
and does not wait for the slow progress of de- 
duction, but goes at once, by what appears a 



ON GENIUS AND COMMON SENSE. 71 

kind of intuition, to the conclusion. A man 
endowed with this faculty feels and acknow- 
ledges the truth, though it is not always in his 
power, perhaps, to give a reason for it ; because 
he cannot recollect and bring before him all the 
materials that gave birth to his opinion ; for 
very many and very intricate considerations may 
unite to form the principle, even of small and 
minute parts, involved in, or dependent on, a 
great system of things : — though these in pro- 
cess of time are forgotten, the right impression 
still remains fixed in his mind. 

" This impression is the result of the ac- 
cumulated experience of our whole life, and has 
been collected, we do not always know how, or 
when. But this mass of collective observation, 
however acquired, ought to prevail over that 
reason, which however powerfully exerted on 
any particular occasion, will probably compre- 
hend but a partial view of the subject ; and our 
conduct in life, as well as in the arts, is or ought 
to be generally governed by this habitual reason : 
it is our happiness that we are enabled to draw 
on such funds. If we were obliged to enter into 
a theoretical deliberation on every occasion be- 
fore we act, life would be at a stand, and Art 
would be impracticable. 

" It appears to me therefore" (continues Sir 



72 ON GENIUS AND COMMON SENSE. 

Joshua) "that our first thoughts, that is, the 
effect which any thing produces on our minds, 
on its first appearance, is never to be forgotten ; 
and it demands for that reason, because it is 
the first, to be laid up with care. If this be 
not done, the artist may happen to impose on 
himself by partial reasoning; by a cold con- 
sideration of those animated thoughts which 
proceed, not perhaps from caprice or rashness 
(as he may afterwards conceit), but from the 
fulness of his mind, enriched with the copious 
stores of all the various inventions which he 
had ever seen, or had ever passed in his mind. 
These ideas are infused into his design, without 
any conscious effort ; but if he be not on his 
guard, he may reconsider and correct them, till 
the whole matter is reduced to a common-place 
invention. 

" This is sometimes the effect of what I 
mean to caution you against ; that is to say, an 
unfounded distrust of the imagination and feel- 
ing, in favour of narrow, partial, confined, ar- 
gumentative theories, and of principles that 
seem to apply to the design in hand ; without 
considering those general impressions on the 
fancy in which real principles of sound reason, 
and of much more weight and importance, are 
involved, and, as it were, lie hid under the ap- 



ON GENIUS AND COMMON SENSE. ^3 

pearance of a sort of vulgar sentiment. Reason, 
without doubt, must ultimately determine every 
thing; at this minute it is required to inform 
us when that very reason is to give way to 
feeling." — Discourse XIII. vol. ii. p. 113-17. 

Mr. Burke, by whom the foregoing train of 
thinking was probably suggested, has insisted 
on the same thing, and made rather a perverse 
use of it in several parts of his Reflections on 
the French Revolution ; and Windham in one 
of his Speeches has clenched it into an aphorism 
— " There is nothing so true as habit.' ' Once 
more I would say, common sense is tacit reason. 
Conscience is the same tacit sense of right and 
wrong, or the impression of our moral expe- 
rience and moral apprehensions on the mind, 
which, because it works unseen, yet certainly, 
we suppose to be an instinct, implanted in the 
mind; as we sometimes attribute the violent 
operations of our passions, of which we can 
neither trace the source nor assign the reason, 
to the instigation of the Devil ! 

I shall here try to go more at large into this 
subject, and to give such instances and illustra- 
tions of it as occur to me. 

One of the persons who had rendered them- 
selves obnoxious to Government and been in- 
cluded in a charge for high treason in the year 



74< ON GENIUS AND COMMON SENSE. 

1794, had retired soon after into Wales to write 
an epic poem and enjoy the luxuries of a rural 
life. In his peregrinations through that beau- 
tiful scenery, he had arrived one fine morning 
at the inn at Llangollen, in the romantic valley 
of that name. He had ordered his breakfast, 
and was sitting at the window in all the dal- 
liance of expectation when a face passed of 
which he took no notice at the instant — but 
when his breakfast was brought in presently 
after, he found his appetite for it gone, the 
day had lost its freshness in his eye* he was un- 
easy and spiritless ; and without any cause that 
he could discover, a total change had taken 
place in his feelings. While he was trying to 
account for this odd circumstance, the same 
face passed again — it was the face of Taylor the 
spy ; and he was no longer at a loss to explain 
the difficulty. He had before caught only a 
transient glimpse, a passing side-view of the 
face ; but though this was not sufficient to 
awaken a distinct idea in his memory, his feel- 
ings, quicker and surer, had taken the alarm ; 
a string had been touched that gave ajar to his 
whole frame, and would not let him rest, though 
he could not at all tell what was the matter 
with him. To the flitting, shadowy, half-dis- 
tinguished profile that had glided by his window 



ON GENIUS AND COMMON SENSE. 75 

was linked unconsciously and mysteriously, but 
inseparably, the impression of the trains that 
had been laid for him by this person ; — in this 
brief moment, in this dim, illegible short-hand 
of the mind he had just escaped the speeches of 
the Attorney and Solicitor-General over again ; 
the gaunt figure of Mr. Pitt glared by him ; the 
walls of a prison enclosed him ; and he felt the 
hands of the executioner near him, without 
knowing it till the tremor and disorder of his 
nerves gave information to his reasoning facul- 
ties that all w T as not well within. That is, the 
same state of mind was recalled by one circum- 
stance in the series of association that had been 
produced by the whole set of circumstances at 
the time, though the manner in which this was 
done was not immediately perceptible. In other 
words, the feeling of pleasure or pain, of good 
or evil, is revived and acts instantaneously upon 
the mind, before we have time to recollect the 
precise objects which have originally given birth 
to it*. The incident here mentioned was merely, 

* Sentiment has the same source as that here pointed out. 
Thus the Ranz des Vaches, which has such an effect on the 
minds of the Swiss peasantry, when its well-known sound is 
heard, does not merely recal to them the idea of their coun- 
try, but has associated with it a thousand nameless ideas, 
numberless touches of private affection, of early hope, ro- 



76 ON GENIUS AND COMMON SENSE. 

then, one case of what the learned understand 
by the association of ideas : but all that is meant 
by feeling or common sense is nothing but the 
different cases of the association of ideas, more 
or less true to the impression of the original 
circumstances, as reason begins with the more 
formal development of those circumstances, or 
pretends to account for the different cases of 
the association of ideas. But it does not follow 
that the dumb and silent pleading of the former 
(though sometimes, nay often mistaken) is less 
true than that of its babbling interpreter, or 
that we are never to trust its dictates with- 
out consulting the express authority of reason. 
Both are imperfect, both are useful in their 
way, and therefore both are best together, to 
correct or to confirm one another. It does not 
appear that in the singular instance above men- 
tioned, the sudden impression on the mind was 

mantic adventure, and national pride, all which rush in 
(with mingled currents) to swell the tide of fond remem- 
brance, and make them languish or die for home. What a 
fine instrument the human heart is ! Who shall touch it ? 
Who shall fathom it ? Who shall " sound it from its lowest 
note to the top of its compass ?" Who shall put his hand 
among the strings, and explain their wayward music ? The 
heart alone, when touched by sympathy, trembles and re- 
sponds to their hidden meaning ! 



ON GENIUS AND COMMON SENSE. 77 

superstition or fancy, though it might have 
been thought so, had it not been proved by the 
event to have a real physical and moral cause. 
Had not the same face returned again, the 
doubt would never have been properly cleared 
up, but would have remained a puzzle ever 
after, or perhaps have been soon forgot. — By 
the law of association as laid down by physiolo- 
gists, any impression in a series can recal any 
other impression in that series without going 
through the whole in order : so that the mind 
drops the intermediate links, and passes on ra- 
pidly and by stealth to the more striking effects 
of pleasure or pain which have naturally taken 
the strongest hold of it. By doing this ha- 
bitually and skilfully with respect to the various 
impressions and circumstances with which our 
experience makes us acquainted, it forms a 
series of unpremeditated conclusions on almost 
all subjects that can be brought before it, as 
just as they are of ready application to human 
life ; and common sense is the name of this body 
of unassuming but practical wisdom. Common 
sense, however, is an impartial, instinctive re- 
sult of truth and nature, and will therefore bear 
the test and abide the scrutiny of the most 
severe and patient reasoning. It is indeed in- 



78 ON GENIUS AND COMMON SENSE. 

complete without it. By ingrafting reason on 
feeling, we " make assurance double sure." 

" 'Tis the last key-stone that makes up the arch... 
Then stands it a triumphal mark ! Then men 
Observe the strength, the height, the why and when 
It was erected ; and still walking under, 
Meet some new matter to look up, and wonder." 

But reason, not employed to interpret nature, 
and to improve and perfect common sense and 
experience, is, for the most part, a building 
without a foundation. — The criticism exercised 
by reason then on common sense may be as 
severe as it pleases, but it must be as patient as 
it is severe. Hasty, dogmatical, self-satisfied 
reason is worse than idle fancy, or bigotted pre- 
judice. It is systematic, ostentatious in error, 
closes up the avenues of knowledge, and " shuts 
the gates of wisdom on mankind." It is not 
enough to shew that there is no reason for 
a thing, that we do not see the reason of it : 
if the common feeling, if the involuntary pre- 
judice sets in strong in favour of it, if in spite 
of all we can do, there is a lurking suspicion on 
the side of our first impressions, we must tr)r 
again, and believe that truth is mightier than 
we. So, in offering a definition of any subject, 






ON GENIUS AND COMMON SENSE. 79 

if we feel a misgiving that there is any fact or 
circumstance omitted, but of which we have 
only a vague apprehension, like a name we 
cannot recollect, we must ask for more time, 
and not cut the matter short by an arrogant 
assumption of the point in dispute. Com- 
mon sense thus acts as a check-weight on so- 
phistry, and suspends our rash and superficial 
judgments. On the other hand, if not only no 
reason can be given for a thing, but every reason 
is clear against it, and we can account from 
ignorance, from authority, from interest, from 
different causes, for the prevalence of an opinion 
or sentiment, then we have a right to conclude 
that we have mistaken a prejudice for an in- 
stinct, or have confounded a false and partial 
impression with the fair and unavoidable in- 
ference from general observation. Mr. Burke 
said that we ought not to reject every pre- 
judice, but should separate the husk of prejudice 
from the truth it encloses, and so try to get at 
the kernel within ; and thus far he was right. 
But he was wrong in insisting that we are to 
cherish our prejudices, " because they are pre- 
judices :" for if they are all well-founded, there 
is no occasion to inquire into their origin or 
use ; and he who sets out to philosophise upon 
them, or make the separation Mr. Burke talks 



80 ON GENIUS AND COMMON SENSE. 

of in this spirit and with this previous deter- 
mination, will be very likely to mistake a maggot 
or a rotten canker for the precious kernel of 
truth, as was indeed the case with our political 
sophist. 

There is nothing more distinct than common 
sense and vulgar opinion. Common sense is 
only a judge of things that fall under common 
observation, or immediately come home to the 
business and bosoms of men. This is of the 
very essence of its principle, the basis of its 
pretensions. It rests upon the simple process 
of feeling, it anchors in experience. It is not, 
nor it cannot be, the test of abstract, speculative 
opinions. But half the opinions and prejudices 
of mankind, those which they hold in the most 
unqualified approbation and which have been 
instilled into them under the strongest sanc- 
tions, are of this latter kind, that is, opinions, 
not which they have ever thought, known, or 
felt one tittle about, but which they have taken 
up on trust from others, which have been palmed 
on their understandings by fraud or force, and 
which they continue to hold at the peril of life, 
limb, property, and character, with as little 
warrant from common sense in the first instance 
as appeal to reason in the last. The ultima 
ratio regum proceeds upon a very different plea. 



ON GENIUS AND COMMON SENSE. 81 

Common sense is neither priestcraft nor state- 
policy. Yet " there's the rub that makes ab- 
surdity of so long life ;" and, at the same time, 
gives the sceptical philosophers the advantage 
over us. Till nature has fair play allowed it, 
and is not adulterated by political and oolemi- 
cal quacks, (as it so often has been) it is im- 
possible to appeal to it as a defence against the 
errors and extravagances of mere reason. If 
we talk of common sense, we are twitted with 
vulgar prejudice, and asked how we distinguish 
the one from the other : but common and re- 
ceived opinion is indeed " a compost heap" of 
crude notions, got together by the pride and 
passions of individuals, and reason is itself the 
thrall or manumitted slave of the same lordly 
and besotted masters, dragging its servile chain, 
or committing all sorts of Saturnalian licenses, 
the moment it feels itself freed from it. — If ten 
millions of Englishmen are furious in thinking 
themselves right in making war upon thirty 
millions of Frenchmen, and if the last are equally 
bent upon thinking the others always in the 
wrong, though it is a common and national pre- 
judice, both opinions cannot be the dictate of 
good sense : but it may be the infatuated policy 
of one or both governments to keep their sub- 
jects always at variance. If a few centuries 

G 



82 ON GENIUS AND COMMON SENSE. 

ago all Europe believed in the infallibility of the 
Pope, this was not an opinion derived from the 
proper exercise or erroneous direction of the 
common sense of the people : common sense 
had nothing to do with it — they believed what- 
ever their priests told them. England at present 
is divided into Whigs and Tories, Churchmen 
and Dissenters : both parties have numbers on 
their side ; but common sense and party-spirit 
are two different things. Sects and heresies 
are upheld partly by sympathy, and partly by 
the love of contradiction : if there was nobody 
of a different way of thinking, they would fall to 
pieces of themselves. If a whole court say the 
same thing, this is no proof that they think it, 
but that the individual at the head of the court 
has said it : if a mob agree for a while in shout- 
ing the same watch-word, this is not to me an 
example of the sensus communis, they only repeat 
what they have heard repeated by others. If 
indeed a large proportion of the people are in 
want of food, of clothing, of shelter, if they are 
sick, miserable, scorned, oppressed, and if each 
feeling it in himself, they all say so with one 
voice and one heart, and lift up their hands to 
second their appeal, this I should say was but 
the dictate of common sense, the cry of nature. 
But to wave this part of the argument, which it 



ON GENIUS AND COMMON SENSE. 83 

is needless to push farther. — I believe that the 
best way to instruct mankind is not by pointing 
out to them their mutual errors, but by teaching 
them to think rightly on indifferent matters, 
where they will listen with patience in order to 
be amused, and where they do not consider a 
definition or a syllogism as the greatest injury 
you can offer them. 

There is no rule for expression. It is got at 
solely hy feeling, that is, on the principle of the 
association of ideas, and by transferring what 
has been found to hold good in one case (with the 
necessary modifications) to others. A certain 
look has been remarked strongly indicative of a 
certain passion or trait of character, and we at- 
tach the same meaning to it or are affected in the 
same pleasurable or painful manner by it, where 
it exists in a less degree, though we can define 
neither the look itself nor the modification of it. 
Having got the general clue, the exact result 
may be left to the imagination to vary, to ex- 
tenuate, or aggravate it according to circum- 
stances. In the admirable profile of Oliver 

Cromwell after , the drooping eye-lids, 

as if drawing a veil over the fixed, penetrating 
glance, the nostrils somewhat distended, and 
lips compressed so as hardly to let the breath 
escape him, denote the character of the man for 

o 9 



84 ON GENIUS AND COMMON SENSE. 

high-reaching policy and deep designs as plainly 
as they can be written. How is it that we de- 
cypher this [expression in the face ? First, by 
feeling it : and how is it that we feel it ? Not 
by pre-established rules, but by the instinct of 
analogy, by the principle of association, which is 
subtle and sure in proportion as it is variable 
and indefinite. A circumstance, apparently of 
no value, shall, alter the whole interpretation to 
be put upon an expression or action ; and it shall 
alter it thus powerfully because in proportion 
to its very insignificance it shews a strong general 
principle at work that extends in its ramifica- 
tions to the smallest things. This in fact will 
make all the difference between minuteness and 
subtlety or refinement; for a small or trivial 
effect may in given circumstances imply the 
operation of a great power. Stillness may be 
the result of a blow too powerful to be resisted ; 
silence may be imposed by feelings too agonis- 
ing for utterance. The minute, the trifling and 
insipid is that which is little in itself, in its 
causes and its consequences : the subtle and re- 
fined is that which is slight and evanescent at 
first sight, but which mounts up to a mighty 
sum in the end, which is an essential part of 
an important whole, which has consequences 
greater than itself, and where more is meant 



ON GENIUS AND COMMON SENSE. 85 

than'meets the eye or ear. We complain some- 
times of littleness in a Dutch picture, where 
there are a vast number of distinct parts and 
objects, each small in itself, and leading to no- 
thing else. A sky of Claude's cannot fall under 
this censure, where one imperceptible gradation 
is as it were the scale to another, where the 
broad arch of heaven is piled up of endlessly in- 
termediate gold and azure tints, and where an 
infinite number of minute, scarce noticed par- 
ticulars blend and melt into universal harmony. 
The subtlety in Shakespear, of which there is 
an immense deal every where scattered up and 
down, is always the instrument of passion, the 
vehicle of character. The action of a man pull- 
ing his hat over his forehead is indifferent 
enough in itself, and generally speaking, may 
mean any thing or nothing : but in the circum- 
stances in which Macduff is placed, it is neither 
insignificant nor equivocal. 

11 What ! man, ne'er pull your hat upon your brows," &c. 

It admits but of one interpretation or inference, 
that which follows it : — 

" Give sorrow words : the grief that does not speak, 
Whispers the o'er-fraught heart, and bids it break." 

The passage in the same play, in which Duncan 
and his attendants are introduced commenting 



86 ON GENIUS AND COMMON SENSE. 

on the beauty and situation of Macbeth's castle, 
though familiar in itself, has been often praised 
for the striking contrast it presents to the scenes 
which follow. — The same look in different cir- 
cumstances may convey a totally different ex- 
pression. Thus the eye turned round to look at 
you without turning the head indicates generally 
slyness or suspicion : but if this is combined 
with large expanded eye-lids or fixed eye-brows, 
as we see it in Titian's pictures, it will denote 
calm contemplation or piercing sagacity, with- 
out any thing of meanness or fear of being ob- 
served. In other cases, it may imply merely 
indolent enticing voluptuousness, as in Lely's 
portraits of women. The languor and weakness 
of the eye-lids gives the amorous turn to the ex- 
pression. How should there be a rule for all this 
beforehand, seeing it depends on circumstances 
ever varying, and scarce discernible but by their 
effect on the mind? Rules are applicable to 
abstractions, but expression is concrete and in- 
dividual. We know the meaning of certain 
looks, and we feel how they modify one another 
in conjunction. But we cannot have a separate 
rule to judge of all their combinations in differ- 
ent degrees and circumstances, without foresee- 
ing all those combinations, which is impossible : 
or if we did foresee them, we should only be 



ON GENIUS AND COMMON SENSE. S7 

where we are, that is, we could only make the 
rule as we now judge without it, from imagina- 
tion and the feeling of the moment. The ab- 
surdity of reducing expression to a preconcerted 
system was perhaps never more evidently shewn 
than in a picture of the Judgment of Solomon 
by so great a man as N. Poussin, which I once 
heard admired for the skill and discrimination of 
the artist in making all the women, who are 
ranged on one side, in the greatest alarm at the 
sentence of the judge, while all the men on the 
opposite side see through the design of it. 
Nature does not go to work or cast things in a 
regular mould in this sort of way. I once heard 
a person remark of another — " He has an eye 
like a vicious horse/' This was a fair analogy. 
We all, I believe, have noticed the look of a 
horse's "eye, just before he is going to bite or 
kick. But will any one, therefore, describe to 
me exactly what that look is ? It was the same 
acute observer that said of a self-sufficient prat- 
ing music-master — " He talks on all subjects at 
sight" — which expressed the man at once by an 
allusion to his profession. The coincidence was 
indeed perfect. Nothing else could compare to 
the easy assurance with which this gentleman 
would volunteer an explanation of things of 
which he was most ignorant, but the nonc/ia/ancr 



88 ON GENIUS AND COMMON SENSE. 

with which a musician sits down to a harpsi- 
chord to play a piece he has never seen before. 
My physiognomical friend would not have hit on 
this mode of illustration without knowing the 
profession of the subject of his criticism ; but 
having this hint given him, it instantly sug- 
gested itself to his " sure trailing." The man- 
ner of the speaker was evident ; and the asso- 
ciation of the music-master sitting down to play 
at sight, lurking in his mind, was immediately 
called out by the strength of his impression of 
the character. The feeling of character and 
the felicity of invention in explaining it were 
nearly allied to each other. The first was so 
wrought up and running over that the transition 
to the last was easy and unavoidable. When 
Mr. Kean was so much praised for the action of 
Richard in his last struggle with his triumphant 
antagonist, where he stands, after his sword is 
wrested from him, with his hands stretched out, 
" as if his will could not be disarmed, and the 
very phantoms of his despair had a withering 
power," he said that he borrowed it from seeing 
the last efforts of Painter in his fight with Oliver. 
This assuredly did not lessen the merit of it. 
Thus it ever is with the man of real genius. 
He has the feeling of truth .already shrined in 
bis own breast, and his eye is still bent on 



ON GENIUS AND COMMON SENSE. S[) 

nature to see how she expresses herself. When 
we thoroughly understand the subject, it is easy 
to translate from one language into another. Ra- 
phael, in muffling up the figure of Elymas the 
Sorcerer in his garments, appears to have ex- 
tended the idea of blindness even to his clothes. 
Was this design ? Probably not ; but merely the 
feeling of analogy thoughtlessly suggesting this 
device, which being so suggested was retained 
and carried on, because it flattered or fell in 
with the original feeling. The tide of passion, 
when strong, overflows and gradually insinuates 
itself into all nooks and corners of the mind. 
Invention (of the best kind) I therefore do not 
think so distinct a thing from feeling, as some 
are apt to imagine. The springs of pure feel- 
ing will rise and fill the moulds of fancy that are 
fit to receive it. There are some striking coin- 
cidences of colour in well-composed pictures, as 
in a straggling weed in the foreground streaked 
with blue or red*to answer to a blue or red 
drapery, to the tone of the flesh or an opening in 
the sky : — not that this was intended, or done by 
rule (for then it would presently become affected 
and ridiculous) but the eye being imbued with a 
certain colour, repeats and varies it from a na- 
tural sense of harmony, a secret craving and ap- 
, petite for beauty, which in the same manner 



90 ON GENIUS AND COMMON SENSE. 

soothes and gratifies the eye of taste, though 
the cause is not understood. Tact, finesse \ is 
nothing but the being completely aware of the 
feeling belonging to certain situations, passions, 
&c. and the being consequently sensible to their 
slightest indications or movements in others. 
One of the most remarkable instances of this 
sort of faculty is the following story, told of 
Lord Shaftesbury, the grandfather of the author 
of the Characteristics. He had been to dine 
with Lady Clarendon and her daughter, who was 
at that time privately married to the Duke of 
York (afterwards James II.) and as he returned 
home with another nobleman who had accom- 
panied him, he suddenly turned to him, and 
said, " Depend upon it, the Duke has married 
Hyde's daughter." His companion could not 
comprehend what he meant ; but on explaining 
himself, he said, " Her mother behaved to her 
with an attention and a marked respect that it is 
impossible to account for in any other way ; and 
I am sure of it." His conjecture shortly after- 
wards proved to be the truth. This was carry- 
ing the prophetic spirit of common sense as far 
as it could go. — 



ESSAY V. 

THE SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED. 



ESSAY V. 
THE SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED. 



Genius or originality is, for the most part, 
some strong quality in the mind, answering to 
and bringing out some new and striking quality 
in nature. 

Imagination is, more properly, the power of 
carrying on a given feeling into other situations, 
which must be done best according to the hold 
which the feeling itself has taken of the mind*. 
In new and unknown combinations, the im- 
pression must act by sympathy, and not by 
rule ; but there can be no sympathy, where 
there is no passion, no original interest. The 
personal interest may in some cases oppress and 
circumscribe the imaginative faculty, as in the in- 
stance of Rousseau : but in general the strength 
and consistency of the imagination will be in 
proportion to the strength and depth of feeling ; 

* I da not here speak of the figurative or fanciful exer- 
cise of the imagination, which consists in finding out some 
striking object or image to illustrate another. 



94> ON GENIUS AND COMMON SENSE. 

and it is rarely that a man even of lofty genius 
will be able to do more than carry on his own 
feelings and character, or some prominent and 
ruling passion, into fictitious and uncommon 
situations. Milton has by allusion embodied a 
great part of his political and personal history 
in the chief characters and incidents of Paradise 
Lost. He has, no doubt, wonderfully adapted 
and heightened them, but the elements are the 
same ; you trace the bias and opinions of the 
man in the creations of the poet. Shakespear 
(almost alone) seems to have been a man of 
genius, raised above the definition of genius. 
" Born universal heir to all humanity," he was 
" as one, in suffering all who suffered nothing ;" 
with a perfect sympathy with all things, yet 
alike indifferent to all: who did not tamper 
with nature or warp her to his own purposes ; 
who " knew all qualities with a learned spirit," 
instead of judging of them by his own predi- 
lections ; and was rather " a pipe for the Muse's 
finger to play what stop she pleased," than 
anxious to set up any character or pretensions 
of his own. His genius consisted in the faculty 
of transforming himself at will into whatever 
he chose : his originality was the power of see- 
ing every object from the exact point of view 
in which others would see it. He was the Pro- 



ON GENIUS AND COMMON SENSE. 9<5 

teus of human intellect. Genius in ordinary 
is a more obstinate and less versatile thing. It is 
sufficiently exclusive and self-willed, quaint and 
peculiar. It does some one thing by virtue of 
doing nothing else : it excels in some one pur- 
suit by being blind to all excellence but its own. 
It is just the reverse of the cameleon ; for it 
does not borrow, but lend its colours to all about 
it : or like the glow-worm, discloses a little circle 
of gorgeous light in the twilight of obscurity, 
in the night of intellect, that surrounds it. 
So did Rembrandt. If ever there was a man 
of genius, he was one, in the proper sense of 
the term. He lived in and revealed to others 
a world of his own, and might be said to have 
invented a new view of nature. He did not 
discover things out of nature, in fiction or fairy 
land, or make a voyage to the moon " to descry 
new lands, rivers, or mountains in her spotty 
globe," but saw things in nature that every one 
had missed before him, and gave others eyes to 
see them with. This is the test and triumph 
of originality, not to shew us what has never 
been, and what we may therefore very easily 
never have dreamt of, but to point out to us 
what is before our eyes and under our feet, 
though we have had no suspicion of its exist- 
ence, for want of sufficient strength of intuition, 



96 ON GENIUS AND COMMON SENSE. 

of determined grasp of mind to seize and retain 
it. Rembrandt's conquests were not over the 
ideal, but the real. He did not contrive a new 
story or character, but we nearly owe to him a 
fifth part of painting, the knowledge of chiaro- 
scuro — a distinct power and element in art and 
nature. He had a steadiness, a firm keeping of 
mind and eye, that first stood the shock of 
" fierce extremes" in light and shade, or recon- 
ciled the greatest obscurity and the greatest 
brilliancy into perfect harmony; and he there- 
fore was the first to hazard this appearance 
upon canvas, and give full effect to what he saw 
and delighted in. He was led to adopt this style 
of broad and startling contrast from its con- 
geniality to his own feelings : his mind grappled 
with that which afforded the best exercise to its 
master-powers : he was bold in act, because he 
was urged on by a strong native impulse. Ori- 
ginality is then nothing but nature and feeling 
working in the mind. A man does not affect to 
be original : he is so, because he cannot help it, 
and often without knowing it. This extraordi- 
nary artist indeed might be said to have had a 
particular organ for colour. His eye seemed to 
come in contact with it as a feeling, to lay hold of 
it as a substance, rather than to contemplate it as 
a visual object. The texture of his landscapes is 



ON GENIUS AND COMMON SENSE. 97 

"of the earth, earthy" — his clouds are humid, 
heavy, slow ; his shadows are " darkness that 
may be felt," a " palpable obscure ;" his lights 
are lumps of liquid splendour ! There is some- 
thing more in this than can be accounted for 
from design or accident : Rembrandt was not a 
man made up of two or three rules and direc- 
tions for acquiring genius. 

I am afraid I shall hardly write so satisfactory 
a character of Mr. Wordsworth, though he, too, 
like Rembrandt, has a faculty of making some- 
thing out of nothing, that is, out of himself, by 
the medium through which he sees and with 
which he clothes the barrenest subject. Mr. 
Wordsworth is the last man to " look abroad 
into universality," if that alone constituted 
genius : he looks at- home into himself, and is 
" content with riches fineless." He would in 
the other case be "poor as winter," if he had 
nothing but general capacity to trust to. He is 
the greatest, that is, the most original poet of 
the present day, only because he is the greatest 
egotist. He is " self-involved, not dark." He 
sits in the centre of his own being, and there 
" enjoys bright day." He does not waste a 
thought on others. Whatever does not relate 
exclusively and wholly to himself, is foreign to 
his views. He contemplates a whole-length 

ii 



98 ON GENIUS AND COMMON SENSE. 

figure of himself, he looks along the unbroken 
line of his personal identity. He thrusts aside all 
other objects, all other interests with scorn and 
impatience, that he may repose on his own being, 
that he may dig out the treasures of thought 
contained in it, that he may unfold the precious 
stores of a mind, for ever brooding over itself. 
His genius is the effect of his individual charac- 
ter. He stamps that character, that deep indi- 
vidual interest, on whatever he meets. The object 
is nothing but as it furnishes food for internal 
meditation, for old associations. If there had 
been no other being in the universe, Mr. Words- 
worth's poetry would have been just what it is. 
If there had been neither love nor friendship, 
neither ambition nor pleasure nor business in 
the world, the author of the Lyrical Ballads need 
not have been greatly changed from what he is 
— might still have " kept the noiseless tenour 
of his way," retired in the sanctuary of his 
own heart, hallowing the Sabbath of his own 
thoughts. With the passions, the pursuits, and 
imaginations of other men he does not profess 
to sympathise, but " finds tongues in the trees, 
books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, 
and good in every thing." With a mind averse 
from outward objects, but ever intent upon its 
own workings, lie hangs a weight of thought 



ON GENIUS AND COMMON SENSE. 99 

and feeling upon every trifling circumstance 
connected with his past history. The note of 
the cuckoo sounds in his ear like the voice of 
other years ; the daisy spreads its leaves in the 
rays of boyish delight, that stream from his 
thoughtful eyes ; the rainbow lifts its proud 
arch in heaven but to" mark his progress from 
infancy to manhood; an old thorn is buried, 
bowed down under the mass of associations he 
has wound about it ; and to him, as he himself 
beautifully says, 

" The meanest flow'r that blows can give 

Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears." 

It is this power of habitual sentiment, or of 
transferring the interest of our conscious exist- 
ence to whatever gently solicits attention, and 
is a link in the chain of association, without 
rousing our passions or hurting our pride, that 
is the striking feature in Mr. Wordsworth's 
mind and poetry. Others have felt and shown 
this power before, as Withers, Burns, &c. but 
none have felt it so intensely and absolutely as 
to lend to it the voice of inspiration, as to make 
it the foundation of a new style and school in 
poetry. His strength, as it so often happens, 
arises from the excess of his weakness. But he 
has opened a new avenue to the human heart, 

h l 2 



100 ON GENIUS AND COMMON SENSE. 

has explored another secret haunt and nook of 
nature, " sacred to verse, and sure of everlast- 
ing fame." Compared with his lines, Lord 
Byron's stanzas are but exaggerated common- 
place, and Walter Scott's poetry (not his prose) 
old wives' fables*. There is no one in whom I 
have been more disappointed than in the w T riter 
here spoken of, nor with whom I am more dis- 
posed on certain points to quarrel : but the love 
of truth and justice which obliges me to do this, 
will not suffer me to blench his merits. Do 
what he can, he cannot help being an original- 
minded man. His poetry is not servile. While 
the cuckoo returns in the spring, while the daisy 
looks bright in the sun, while the rainbow lifts 
its head above the storm — 

" Yet I '11 remember thee, Glencairn, 
And all that thou hast done for me !" 

Sir Joshua Reynolds, in endeavouring to show 
that there is no such thing as proper originality, 
a spirit emanating from the mind of the artist 
and shining through his works, has traced Ra- 
phael through a number of figures which he has 
borrowed from Masaccio and others. This is a 
bad calculation. If Raphael had only borrowed 
those figures from others, would he, even in Sir 

* Mr. Wordsworth himself should not say this, and yet I 
am not sure he would not. 



ON GENIUS AND COMMON SENSE. 101 

Joshua's sense, have been entitled to the praise 
of originality? Plagiarism, I presume, in so far 
as it is plagiarism, is not originality. Salvator 
is considered by many as a great genius. He 
was what they call an irregular genius. My 
notion of genius is not exactly the same as theirs. 
It has also been made a question whether there 
is not more genius in Rembrandt's Three Trees 
than in all Claude Lorraine's landscapes ? I do 
not know how that may be : but it was enough 
for Claude to have been a perfect landscape- 
painter. 

Capacity is not the same thing as genius. 
Capacity may be described to relate to the 
quantity of knowledge, however acquired; genius 
to its quality and the mode of acquiring it. 
Capacity is a power over given ideas or com- 
binations of ideas ; genius is the power over 
those which are not given, and for which no 
obvious or precise rule can be laid down. Or 
capacity is power of any sort : genius is power 
of a different sort from what has yet been shown. 
A retentive memory, a clear understanding is 
capacity, but it is not genius. The admirable 
Crichton was a person of prodigious capacity ; 
but there is no proof (that I know) that he had 
an atom of genius. His verses that remain are 
dull and sterile. He could learn all that was 



102 ON GENIUS AND COMMON SENSE. 

known of any subject : he could do any thing if 
others could show him the way to do it. This 
was very w r onderful : but that is all you can say 
of it. It requires a good capacity to play well 
at chess : but, after all, it is a game of skill, and 
not of genius. Know what you will of it, the 
understanding still moves in certain tracks in 
which others have trod before it, quicker or slower, 
with more or less comprehension and presence 
of mind. The greatest skill strikes out nothing 
for itself, from its own peculiar resources ; the 
nature of the game is a thing determinate and 
fixed : there is no royal or poetical road to 
check-mate your adversary. There is no place 
for genius but in the indefinite and unknown. 
The discovery of the binomial theorem was an 
effort of genius ; but there was none shown in 
Jedediah Buxton's being able to multiply 9 
figures by 9 in his head. If he could have mul- 
tiplied 90 figures by 90 instead of 9, it would 
have been equally useless toil and trouble*. 

* The only good thing I ever heard come of this man's 
singular faculty of memory was the following. A gentleman 
was mentioning his having been sent up to London from the 
place where he lived to see Garrick act. When he went 
back into the country, he was asked what he thought of the 
player and the play. " Oh !" he said, " he did not know : 
he had only seen a little man strut about the stage, and 






ON GENIUS AND COMMON SENSE. 103 

He is a man of capacity who possesses consider- 
able intellectual riches : he is a man of genius 
who finds out a vein of new ore. Originality is 
the seeing nature differently from others, and 
yet as it is in itself. It is not singularity or 
affectation, but the discovery of new and valu- 
able truth. All the world do not see the whole 
meaning of any object they have been looking at. 
Habit blinds them to some things : short-sighted- 
ness to others. Every mind is not a gauge and 
measure of truth. Nature has her surface and 
her dark recesses. She is deep, obscure, and 
infinite. It is only minds on whom she makes 
her fullest impressions that can penetrate her 
shrine or unveil her Holy of Holies. It is only 
those whom she has filled with her spirit that 
have the boldness or the power to reveal her 
mysteries to others. But nature has a thousand 
aspects, and one man can only draw out one of 

repeat 7956 words." We all laughed at this, but a person 
in one corner of the room, holding one hand to his forehead, 
and seeming mightily delighted, called out, ic Ay, indeed ! 
And pray, was he found to be correct?" This was the 
supererogation of literal matter-of-fact curiosity. Jedediah 
Buxton's counting the number of words was idle enough ; 
but here was a fellow who wanted some one to count them 
over again to see if he was correct. 



*' The force ol' dulnt&s could no farther 



go 



104 ON GENIUS AND COMMON SENSE. 

them. Whoever does this, is a man of genius. 
One displays her force, another her refinement, 
one her power of harmony, another her sudden- 
ness of contrast, one her beauty of form, another 
her splendour of colour. Each does that for 
which he is best fitted by his particular genius, 
that is to say, by some quality of mind into 
which the quality of the object sinks deepest, 
where it finds the most cordial welcome, is per- 
ceived to its utmost extent, and where again it 
forces its way out from the fulness with which it 
has taken possession of the mind of the student. 
The imagination gives out what it has first ab- 
sorbed by congeniality of temperament, what it 
has attracted and moulded into itself by elective 
affinity, as the loadstone draws and impregnates 
iron. A little originality is more esteemed and 
sought for than the greatest acquired talent, be- 
cause it throws a new light upon things, and is 
peculiar to the individual. The other is common ; 
and may be had for the asking, to any amount. 

The value of any work is to be judged of 
by the quantity of originality contained in it. 
A very little of this will go a great way. If 
Goldsmith had never written any thing but 
the two or three first chapters of the Vicar of 
Wakefield, or the character of a Village-School- 
master, they would have stamped him a man of 



ON GENIUS AND COMMON SENSE. 105 

genius. The Editors of Encyclopedias are not 
usually reckoned the first literary characters of 
the age. The works, of which they have the 
management, contain a great deal of knowledge, 
like chests or warehouses, but the goods are 
not their own. We should as soon think of ad- 
miring the shelves of a library ; but the shelves of 
a library are useful and respectable. I was once 
applied to, in a delicate emergency, to write an 
article on a difficult subject for an Encyclopedia, 
and was advised to take time and give it a 
systematic and scientific form, to avail myself 
of all the knowledge that was to be obtained on 
the subject, and arrange it with clearness and 
method. I made answer that as to the first, I 
had taken time to do all that I ever pretended 
to do, as I had thought incessantly on different 
matters for twenty years of my life*; that I 
had no particular knowledge of the subject in 
question, and no head for arrangement; and 
that the utmost I could do in such a case would 
be, when a systematic and scientific article was 
prepared, to write marginal notes upon it, to 
insert a remark or illustration of my own (not 
to be found in former Encyclopedias) or to 



* Sir Joshua Reynolds being asked how long it had taken 
him to do a certain picture, made answer, " All his life." 



106 OxV genius And common sense. 

suggest a better definition than had been offered 
in the text. There are two sorts of writing. 
The first is compilation ; and consists in collect- 
ing and stating all that is already known of any 
question in the best possible manner, for the 
benefit of the uninformed reader. An author 
of this class is a very learned amanuensis of 
other people's thoughts. The second sort pro- 
ceeds on an entirely different principle. Instead 
of bringing down the account of knowledge to 
the point at which it has already arrived, it pro- 
fesses to start from that point on the strength 
of the writer's individual reflections ; and sup- 
posing the reader in possession of what is already 
known, supplies deficiencies, fills up certain 
blanks, and quits the beaten road in search of 
new tracts of observation or sources of feeling. 
It is in vain to object to this last style that it is 
disjointed, disproportioned, and irregular. It is 
merely a set of additions and corrections to other 
men's works, or to the common stock of human 
knowledge, printed separately. You might as 
well expect a continued chain of reasoning in 
the notes to a book. It skips all the trite, 
intermediate, level common-places of the sub- 
ject, and only stops at the difficult passages of 
the human mind, or touches on some striking 
point that lias been overlooked in previous edi- 



ON GENIUS AND COMMON SENSE. 107 

tions. A view of a subject, to be connected 
and regular, cannot be all new. A writer will 
always be liable to be charged either with para- 
dox or common-place, either with dulness or 
affectation. But we have no right to demand 
from any one more than he pretends to. There 
is indeed a medium in all things, but to unite 
opposite excellencies, is a task ordinarily too 
hard for mortality. He who succeeds in what 
he aims at, or who takes the lead in any one 
mode or path of excellence, may think himself 
very well off. It would not be fair to complain 
of the style of an Encyclopedia as dull, as want- 
ing volatile salt ; nor of the style of an Essay 
because it is too light and sparkling, because it 
is not a caput mortuum. So it is rather an odd 
objection to a work that it is made up entirely 
of " brilliant passages" — at least it is a fault 
that can be found with few works, and the book 
might be pardoned for its singularity. The 
censure might indeed seem like adroit flattery, 
if it were not passed on an author whom any 
objection is sufficient to render unpopular and 
ridiculous. I grant it is best to unite solidity 
with show, general information with particular 
ingenuity. This is the pattern of a perfect 
style : but I myself do not pretend to be a per- 
fect writer. In fine, we do not banish light 



108 ON GENIUS AND COMMON SENSE. 

French wines from our tables, or refuse to taste 
sparkling Champagne when we can get it, be- 
cause it has not the body of Old Port. Besides, 
I do not know that dulness is strength, or that 
an observation is slight, because it is striking. 
Mediocrity, insipidity, want of character is the 
great fault. Mediocribus esse poetis non Dii, 
non homines, non concessere columnar. Neither 
is this privilege allowed to prose-writers in our 
time, any more than to poets formerly. 

It is not then acuteness of organs or extent 
of capacity that constitutes rare genius or pro- 
duces the most exquisite models of art, but an 
intense sympathy with some one beauty or di- 
stinguishing characteristic in nature. Irritability 
alone, or the interest taken in certain things, may 
supply the place of genius in weak and otherwise 
ordinary minds. As there are certain instruments 
fitted to perform certain kinds of labour, there 
are certain minds so framed as to produce cer- 
tain chef-d 9 ccwvres in art and literature, which is 
surely the best use they can be put to. If a 
man had all sorts of instruments in his shop and 
wanted one, he would rather have that one than 
be supplied with a double set of all the others. 
If he had them all twice over, he could only do 
what he can do as it is, whereas without that 
one he perhaps cannot finish any one work he 



ON GENIUS AND COMMON SENSE. 109 

has in hand. So if a man can do one thing 
better than any body else, the value of this one 
thing is what he must stand or fall by, and his 
being able to do a hundred other things merely 
as "well as any body else, would not alter the 
sentence or add to his respectability ; on the 
contrary, his being able to do so many other 
things well would probably interfere with and 
incumber him in the execution of the only thing 
that others cannot do as well as he, and so far 
be a draw-back and a disadvantage. More 
people in fact fail from a multiplicity of talents 
and pretensions than from an absolute poverty 
of resources. I have given instances of this 
elsewhere. Perhaps Shakespear's tragedies would 
in some respects have been better, if he had 
never written comedies at all ; and in that case, 
his comedies might well have been spared, 
though they must have cost us some regret. 
Racine, it is said, might have rivalled Moliere 
in comedy ; but he gave up the cultivation of 
his comic talents to devote himself wholly to the 
tragic Muse. If, as the French tell us, he in 
consequence attained to the perfection of tragic 
composition, this was better than writing co- 
medies as well as Moliere and tragedies as well as 
Crebillon. Yet I count those persons fools who 
think it a pity Hogarth did not succeed better 



110 ON GENIUS AND COMMON SENSE. 

in serious subjects. The division of labour is an 
excellent principle in taste as well as in me- 
chanics. Without this, I find from Adam Smith, 
we could not have a pin made to the degree of 
perfection it is. We do not, on any rational 
scheme of criticism, inquire into the variety of 
a man's excellences, or the number of his works, 
or his facility of production. Venice Preserved 
is sufficient for Otway's fame. I hate all those 
nonsensical stories about Lope de Vega and his 
writing a play in a morning before breakfast. 
He had time enough to do it after. If a man 
leaves behind him any work which is a model 
in its kind, we have no right to ask whether he 
could do any thing else, or how he did it, or 
how long he was about it. All that talent which 
is not necessary to the actual quantity of excel- 
lence existing in the world, loses its object, is so 
much waste talent or talent to let I heard a 
sensible man say he should like to do some one 
thing better than all the rest of the world, and 
in every thing else to be like all the rest of the 
world. Why should a man do more than his 
part ? The rest is vanity and vexation of spirit. 
We look with jealous and grudging eyes at all 
those qualifications which are not essential; 
first, because they are superfluous, and next, 
because we suspect they will be prejudicial. 



ON GENIUS AND COMMON SENSE. Ill 

Why does Mr. Kean play all those harlequin 
tricks of singing, dancing, fencing, &c? They 
say, " It is for his benefit." It is not for his 
reputation. Garrick indeed shone equally in 
comedy and tragedy. But he was first, not 
second-rate in both. There is not a greater 
impertinence than to ask, if a man is clever out 
of his profession. I have heard of people trying 
to cross-examine Mrs. Siddons. I would as soon 
try to entrap one of the Elgin Marbles into an 
argument. Good nature and common sense are 
required from all people : but one proud distinc- 
tion is enough for any one individual to possess 
or to aspire to ! 



ESSAY VI. 
CHARACTER OF COBBETT. 



ESSAY VI. 
CHARACTER OF COBBETT. 



People have about as substantial an idea of 
Cobbett as they have of Cribb. His blows are 
as hard, and he himself is as impenetrable. One 
has no notion of him as making use of a fine 
pen, but a great mutton-fist ; his style stuns his 
readers, and he " fillips the ear of the public 
with a three-man beetle." He is too much for 
any single newspaper antagonist; " lays waste " 
a city orator or Member of Parliament, and 
bears hard upon the government itself. He is 
a kind of fourth estate in the politics of the 
country. He is not only unquestionably the 
most powerful political writer of the present 
day, but one of the best writers in the language. 
He speaks and thinks plain, broad, downright 
English. He might be said to have the clear- 
ness of Swift, the naturalness of Defoe, and the 
picturesque satirical description of Mandeville ; 
if all such comparisons were not impertinent. 
A really great and original writer is like nobody 

i 2 



116 CHARACTER OF COBBETT. 

but himself. In one sense, Sterne was not a wit, 
nor Shakespear a poet. It is easy to describe 
second-rate talents, because they fall into a 
class and enlist under a standard : but first-rate 
powers defy calculation or comparison, and can 
be defined only by themselves. They are sui 
generis, and make the class to which they belong. 
I have tried half a dozen times to describe 
Burke's style without ever succeeding ; — its 
severe extravagance ; its literal boldness ; its 
matter-of-fact hyperboles ; its running away 
with a subject, and from it at the same time — 
but there is no making it out, for there is no ex- 
ample of the same thing any where else. We 
have no common measure to refer to ; and his 
qualities contradict even themselves. 

Cobbett is not so difficult. He has been com- 
pared to Paine ; and so far it is true there are no 
two writers who come more into juxta-position 
from the nature of their subjects, from the 
internal resources on which they draw, and 
from the popular effect of their writings and 
their adaptation (though that is a bad word in 
the present case) to the capacity of every reader. 
But still if we turn to a volume of Paine's (his 
Common Sense or Bights of Man) we are struck 
(not to say somewhat refreshed) by the differ- 
ence. Paine is a much more sententious writer 



CHARACTER OF COBBETT. 117 

than Cobbett. You cannot open a page in any 
of his best and earlier works without meeting 
with some maxim, some antithetical and memor- 
able saying, which is a sort of starting-place for 
the argument, and the goal to which it returns. 
There is not a single bon-mot, a single sentence 
in Cobbett that has ever been quoted again. If 
any thing is ever quoted from him, it is an epi- 
thet of abuse or a nickname. He is an excel- 
lent hand at invention in that way, and has 
" damnable iteration in him." What could be 
better than his pestering Erskine year after year 
with his second title of Baron Clackmannan? 
He is rather too fond of the Sons and Daughters 
of Corruption. Paine affected to reduce things 
to first principles, to announce self-evident 
truths. Cobbett troubles himself about little 
but the details and local circumstances. The 
first appeared to have made up his mind before- 
hand to certain opinions, and to try to find the 
most compendious and pointed expressions for 
them : his successor appears to have no clue, no 
fixed or leading principles, nor ever to have 
thought on a question till he sits down to write 
about it ; but then there seems no end of his 
matters of fact and raw materials, which are 
brought out in all their strength and sharpness 
from not having been squared or frittered down 



118 CHARACTER OF COBBETT. 

or vamped up to suit a theory — he goes on with 
his descriptions and illustrations as if he would 
never come to a stop ; they have all the force 
of novelty with all the familiarity of old ac- 
quaintance ; his knowledge grows out of the 
subject, and his style is that of a man who has 
an absolute intuition of what he is talking about, 
and never thinks of any thing else. He deals in 
premises and speaks to evidence — the coming 
to a conclusion and summing up (which was 
Paine's forte) lies in a smaller compass. The 
one could not compose an elementary treatise 
on politics to become a manual for the popular 
reader ; nor could the other in all probability 
have kept up a weekly journal for the same 
number of years with the same spirit, interest, 
and untired perseverance. Paine's writings are 
a sort of introduction to political arithmetic on 
a new plan : Cobbett keeps a day-book and 
makes an entry at full of all the occurrences and 
troublesome questions that start up throughout 
the year. Cobbett with vast industry, vast in- 
formation, and the utmost power of making 
what he says intelligible, never seems to get 
at the beginning or come to the end of any 
question : Paine in a few short sentences seems 
by his peremptory manner " to clear it from all 
controversy, past, present, and to come." Paine 



CHARACTER OF COBBETT. 119 

takes a bird's-eye view of things. Cobbett 
sticks close to them, inspects the component 
parts, and keeps fast hold of the smallest ad- 
vantages they afford him. Or if I might here be 
indulged in a pastoral allusion, Paine tries to 
enclose his ideas in a fold for security and re- 
pose ; Cobbett lets his pour out upon the plain 
like a flock of sheep to feed and batten. Cobbett 
is a pleasanter writer for those to read who do 
not agree with him ; for he is less dogmatical, 
goes more into the common grounds of fact and 
argument to which all appeal, is more desultory 
and various, and appears less to be driving at a 
previous conclusion than urged on by the force 
of present conviction. He is therefore tolerated 
by all parties, though he has made himself by 
turns obnoxious to all ; and even those he abuses 
read him. The Reformers read him when he 
was a Tory, and the Tories read him now that 
he is a Reformer. He must, I think, however, 
be caviare to the Whigs *. 

If he is less metaphysical and poetical than 
his celebrated prototype, he is more picturesque 
and dramatic. His episodes, which are nu- 
merous as they are pertinent, are striking, in- 
teresting, full of life and naivete, minute, double 

* The late Lord Thurlow used to say that Cobbett was 
the only writer that deserved the name of a political reasoner. 



120 



CHARACTER OF COBBETT. 



measure running over, but never tedious — nun- 
quam sitfflaminandus erat. He is one of those 
writers who can never tire us, not even of him- 
self j and the reason is, he is always " full of 
matter." He never runs to lees, never gives us 
the vapid leavings of himself, is never " weary, 
stale, and unprofitable," but always setting out 
afresh on his journey, clearing away some old 
nuisance, and turning up new mould. His 
egotism is delightful, for there is no affectation 
in it. He does not talk of himself for lack of 
something to write about, but because some 
circumstance that has happened to himself is 
the best possible illustration of the subject, and 
he is not the man to shrink from giving the 
best possible illustration of the subject from a 
squeamish delicacy. He likes both himself and 
his subject too well. He does not put himself 
before it, and say — " admire me first" — but 
places us in the same situation with himself, 
and makes us see all that he does. There is no 
blindman's-buff, no conscious hints, no awkward 
ventriloquism, no testimonies of applause, no 
abstract, senseless self-complacency, no smug- 
gled admiration of his own person by proxy : it 
is all plain and above-board. He writes himself 
plain William Cobbett, strips himself quite as 
naked as any body would wish — in a word, his 



CHARACTER OF COBBETT. 1<21 

egotism is full of individuality, and has room 
for very little vanity in it. We feel delighted, 
rub our hands, and draw our chair to the fire, 
when we come to a passage of this sort : we 
know it will be something new and good, manly 
and simple, not the same insipid story of self 
over again. We sit down at table with the 
writer, but it is to a course of rich viands, flesh, 
fish, and wild-fowl, and not to a nominal enter- 
tainment, like that given by the Barmecide in 
the Arabian Nights, who put off his visitors 
with calling for a number of exquisite things 
that never appeared, and with the honour of his 
company. Mr. Cobbett is not a make-believe 
writer. His worst enemy cannot say that of 
him. Still less is he a vulgar one. He must 
be a puny, common-place critic indeed, who 
thinks him so. How fine were the graphical 
descriptions he sent us from America : what 
a transatlantic flavour, what a native gusto, 
what a fine sauce piquante of contempt they 
were seasoned with ! If he had sat down to 
look at himself in the glass, instead of looking 
about him like Adam in Paradise, he would not 
have got up these articles in so capital a style. 
What a noble account of his first breakfast after 
his arrival in America! It might serve for a 
month. There is no scene on the stage more 



122 CHARACTER OF COBBETT. 

amusing. How well he paints the gold and 
scarlet plumage of the American birds, only to 
lament more pathetically the want of the wild 
wood-notes of his native land ! The groves of 
the Ohio that had just fallen beneath the axe's 
stroke " live in his description," and the turnips 
that he transplanted from Botley " look green" 
in prose ! How well at another time he de- 
scribes the poor sheep that had got the tick 
and had tumbled down in the agonies of death ! 
It is a portrait in the manner of Bewick, with 
the strength, the simplicity, and feeling of that 
great naturalist. What havoc he makes, when 
lie pleases, of the curls of Dr. Parr's wig and 

of the Whig consistency of Mr. ] His 

Grammar too is as entertaining as a story-book. 
He is too hard upon the style of others, and 
not enough (sometimes) on his own. 

As a political partisan, no one can stand 
against him. With his brandished club, like 
Giant Despair in the Pilgrim's Progress, he 
knocks out their brains ; and not only no indi- 
vidual, but no corrupt system could hold out 
against his powerful and repeated attacks, but 
with the same weapon, swung round like a flail, 
that he levels his antagonists, he lays his friends 
low, and puts his own party hors de combat. 
This is a bad propensity, and a worse principle 



CHARACTER OF COBBETT. 1 c Zo 

in political tactics, though a common one. If 
his blows were straight forward and steadily 
directed to the same object, no unpopular Mini- 
ster could live before him ; instead of which he 
lays about right and left, impartially and re- 
morselessly, makes a clear stage, has all the ring 
to himself, and then runs out of it, just when 
he should stand his ground. He throws his 
head into his adversary's stomach, and takes 
away from him all inclination for the fight, hits 
fair or foul, strikes at every thing, and as you 
come up to his aid or stand ready to pursue his 
advantage, trips up your heels or lays you 
sprawling, and pummels you when down as 
much to his heart's content as ever the Yan- 
guesian carriers belaboured Rosinante with their 
pack-staves. " He has the bach-trick simply the 
best of any man in Illy via" He pays off both 
scores of old friendship and new-acquired en- 
mity in a breath, in one perpetual volley, one 
raking fire of " arrowy sleet" shot from his pen. 
However his own reputation or the cause may 
suffer in consequence, he cares not one pin 
about that, so that he disables all who oppose, 
or who pretend to help him. In fact, he 
cannot bear success of any kind, not even of his 
own views or party ; and if any principle were 
likely to become popular, would turn round 



124 CHARACTER OF COBBETT. 

against it to shew his power in shouldering it 
on one side. In short, wherever power is, there 
is he against it : he naturally butts at all ob- 
stacles, as unicorns are attracted to oak-trees, 
and feels his own strength only by resistance to 
the opinions and wishes of the rest of the world. 
To sail with the stream, to agree with the com- 
pany, is not his humour. If he could bring 
about a Reform in Parliament, the odds are 
that he would instantly fall foul of and try to 
mar his own handy- work ; and he quarrels with 
his own creatures as soon as he has written 
them into a little vogue — and a prison. I do 
not think this is vanity or fickleness so much as 
a pugnacious disposition, that must have an an- 
tagonist power to contend with, and only finds 
itself at ease in systematic opposition. If it 
were not for this, the high towers and rotten 
places of the world would fall before the batter- 
ing-ram of his hard-headed reasoning : but if he 
once found them tottering, he would apply his 
strength to prop them up, and disappoint the 
expectations of his followers. He cannot agree 
to any thing established, nor to set up any 
thing else in its stead. While it is established, 
he presses hard against it, because it presses 
upon him, at least in imagination. Let it 
crumble under his grasp, and the motive to re- 



CHARACTER OF COBBETT. 125 

sistance is gone. He then requires some other 
grievance to set his face against. His principle 
is repulsion, his nature contradiction : he is 
made up of mere antipathies, an Ishmaelite in- 
deed without a fellow. He is always playing 
at hunt-the-slipper in politics. He turns round 
upon whoever is next him. The way to wean 
him from any opinion, and make him conceive 
an intolerable hatred against it, would be to 
place somebody near him who was perpetually 
dinning it in his ears. When he is in England, 
he does nothing but abuse the Boroughmongers, 
and laugh at the whole system : when he is in 
America, he grows impatient of freedom and a 
republic. If he had staid there a little longer, 
he would have become a loyal and a loving 
subject of his Majesty King George IV. He 
lampooned the French Revolution when it was 
hailed as the dawn of liberty by millions : by 
the time it was brought into almost universal 
ill-odour by some means or other (partly no 
doubt by himself) he had turned, with one or 
two or three others, staunch Buonapartist. He 
is always of the militant, not of the triumphant 
party : so far he bears a gallant shew of mag- 
nanimity ; but his gallantry is hardly of the 
right stamp. It wants principle : for though 
he is not servile or mercenary, he is the victim 



126 CHARACTER OF COBBETT. 

of self-will. He must pull down and pull in 
pieces : it is not in his disposition to do other- 
wise. It is a pity ; for with his great talents 
he might do great things, if he would go right 
forward to any useful object, make thorough- 
stitch work of any question, or join hand and 
heart with any principle. He changes his 
opinions as he does his friends, and much on 
the same account. He has no comfort in fixed 
principles : as soon as any thing is settled in 
his own mind, he quarrels with it. He has no 
satisfaction but in the chase after truth, runs a 
question down, worries and kills it, then quits 
it like vermin, and starts some new game, to 
lead him a new dance, and give him a fresh 
breathing through bog and brake, with the 
rabble yelping at his heels and the leaders per- 
petually at fault. This he calls sport-royal. 
He thinks it as good as cudgel-playing or single- 
stick, or any thing else that has life in it. He 
likes the cut and thrust, the falls, bruises, and 
dry blows of an argument : as to any good or 
useful results that may come of the amicable 
settling of it, any one is welcome to them for 
him. The amusement is over, when the matter 
is once fairly decided. 

There is another point of view in which this 
may be put. I might say that Mr. Cobbett is 



CHARACTER OF COBBETT. 1^7 

a very honest man with a total want of principle, 
and I might explain this paradox thus. I mean 
that he is, I think, in downright earnest in what 
he says, in the part he takes at the time ; but in 
taking that part, he is led entirely by headstrong 
obstinacy, caprice, novelty, pique or personal 
motive of some sort, and not by a stedfast regard 
for truth or habitual anxiety for what is right 
uppermost in his mind. He is not a feed, time- 
serving, shuffling advocate (no man could write 
as he does who did not believe himself sincere) 
— but his understanding is the dupe and slave 
of his momentary, violent, and irritable humours. 
He does not adopt an opinion " deliberately or 
for money ;" yet his conscience is at the mercy 
of the first provocation he receives, of the first 
whim he takes in his head ; he sees things 
through the medium of heat and passion, not 
with reference to any general principles, and his 
whole system of thinking is deranged by the 
first object that strikes his fancy or sours his 
temper. — One cause of this phenomenon is per- 
haps his want of a regular education. He is a 
self-taught man, and has the faults as well as 
excellences of that class of persons in their most 
striking and glaring excess. It must be ac- 
knowledged that the Editor of the Political 
Register (the two-penny trash, as it was called, 



128 CHARACTER OF COBBETT. 

till & bill passed the House to raise the price to 
sixpence) is not "the gentleman and scholar:" 
though he has qualities that, with a little better 
management, would be worth (to the public) 
both those titles. For want of knowing what 
has been discovered before him, he has not 
certain general landmarks to refer to, or a ge- 
neral standard of thought to apply to individual 
cases. He relies on his own acuteness and the 
immediate evidence, without being acquainted 
with the comparative anatomy or philosophical 
structure of opinion. He does not view things 
on a large scale or at the horizon (dim and airy 
enough perhaps) — but as they affect himself, 
close, palpable, tangible. Whatever he finds out, 
is his own, and he only knows what he finds out. 
He is in the constant hurry and fever of gesta- 
tion: his brain teems incessantly with some fresh 
project. Every new light is the birth of a new 
system, the dawn of a new world to him. He 
is continually outstripping and overreaching 
himself. The last opinion is the only true one. 
He is wiser to-day than he was yesterday. Why 
should he not be wiser to-morrow than he was 
to-day ? — Men of a learned education are not so 
sharp-witted as clever men without it : but they 
know the balance of the human intellect better; 
if they arc more stupid, they are more steady; 



CHARACTER OF COBBETT. 129 

and are less liable to be led astray by their own 
sagacity and the over-weening petulance of 
hard-earned and late-acquired wisdom. They 
do not fall in love with every meretricious ex- 
travagance at first sight, or mistake an old 
battered hypothesis for a vestal, because they 
are new to the ways of this old world. They 
do not seize upon it as a prize, but are safe 
from gross imposition by being as wise and no 
wiser than those who went before them. 

Paine said on some occasion — " What I have 
written, I have written" — as rendering any far- 
ther declaration of his principles unnecessary. 
Not so Mr. Cobbett. What he has written is 
no rule to him what he is to write. He learns 
something every day, and every week he takes 
the field to maintain the opinions of the last six 
days against friend or foe. I doubt whether 
this outrageous inconsistency, this headstrong 
fickleness, this understood want of all rule and 
method, does not enable him to go on with 
the spirit, vigour, and variety that he does. 
He is not pledged to repeat himself. Every 
new Register is a kind of new Prospectus. He 
blesses himself from all ties and shackles on his 
understanding; he has no mortgages on his 
brain ; his notions are free and unincumbered. 
If he was put in trammels, he might become a 

K 



130 CHARACTER OF COBBETT. 

vile hack like so many more. But he gives him- 
self " ample scope and verge enough.'' He 
takes both sides of a question, and maintains 
one as sturdily as the other. If nobody else 
can argue against him, he is a very good match 
for himself. He writes better in favour of Re- 
form than any body else ; he used to write better 
against it. Wherever he is, there is the tug of 
war, the weight of the argument, the strength 
of abuse. He is not like a man in danger of 
being bed-rid in his faculties — he tosses and 
tumbles about his unwieldy bulk, and when he 
is tired of lying on one side, relieves himself by 
turning on the other. His shifting his point of 
view from time to time not merely adds variety 
and greater compass to his topics (so that the 
Political Register is an armoury and magazine 
for all the materials and weapons of political 
warfare) but it gives a greater zest and liveliness 
to his manner of treating them. Mr. Cobbett 
takes nothing for granted as what he has proved 
before; he does not write a book of reference. 
We see his ideas in their first concoction, fer- 
menting and overflowing with the ebullitions of 
a lively conception. We look on at the actual 
process, and are put in immediate possession of 
the grounds and materials on which he forms 
his sanguine, unsettled conclusions. He does 



CHARACTER OF COBBETT. 131 

not give us samples of reasoning, but the whole 
solid mass, refuse and all. 

— " He pours out all as plain 
As downright Shippen or as old Montaigne." 

This is one cause of the clearness and force of 
his writings. An argument does not stop to 
stagnate and muddle in his brain, but passes at 
once to his paper. His ideas are served up, 
like pancakes, hot and hot. Fresh theories give 
him fresh courage. He is like a young and 
lusty bridegroom that divorces a favourite spe- 
culation every morning, and marries a new one 
every night. He is not wedded to his notions, 
not he. He has not one Mrs. Cobbett among 
all his opinions. He makes the most of the last 
thought that has come in his w T ay, seizes fast 
hold of it, rumples it about in all directions with 
rough strong hands, has his wicked will of it, 
takes a surfeit, and throws it away. — Our au- 
thor's changing his opinions for new ones is not 
so wonderful : what is more remarkable is his 
facility in forgetting his old ones. He does not 
pretend to consistency (like Mr. Coleridge) ; he 
frankly disavows all connexion with himself. 
He feels no personal responsibility in this way, 
and cuts a friend or principle with the same de- 
cided indifference that Antipholis of Ephesus 

k 2 



1S2 CHARACTER OF COBBETT. 

cuts iEgeon of Syracuse. It is a hollow 
thing. The only time he ever grew romantic was 
in bringing over the relics of Mr. Thomas Paine 
with him from America to go a progress with 
them through the disaffected districts. Scarce 
had he landed in Liverpool when he left the 
bones of a great man to shift for themselves ; 
and no sooner did he arrive in London than he 
made a speech to disclaim all participation in 
the political and theological sentiments of his 
late idol, and to place the whole stock of his 
admiration and enthusiasm towards him to the 
account of his financial speculations, and of his 
having predicted the fate of paper-money. If 
he had erected a little gold statue to him, it 
might have proved the sincerity of this as- 
sertion : but to make a martyr and a patron- 
saint of a man, and to dig up " his canonised 
bones" in order to expose them as objects of 
devotion to the rabble's gaze, asks something 
that has more life and spirit in it, more mind and 
vivifying soul, than has to do with any cal- 
culation of pounds, shillings, and pence ! The 
fact is, he ratted from his own project. He found 
the thing not so ripe as he had expected. His 
heart failed him : his enthusiasm fled, and he 
made his retractation. His admiration is short- 
lived: his contempt only is rooted, and his re- 



CHARACTER OF COBBETT. 133 

sentment lasting. — The above was only one in- 
stance of his building too much on practical 
data. He has an ill habit of prophesying, and 
goes on, though still deceived. The art of pro- 
phesying does not suit Mr. Cobbett's style. He 
has a knack of fixing names and times and 
places. According to him, the Reformed Par- 
liament was to meet in March, 1818 — it did 
not, and we heard no more of the matter. When 
his predictions fail, he takes no farther notice 
of them, but applies himself to new ones — like 
the country-people who turn to see what weather 
there is in the almanac for the next week, though 
it has been out in its reckoning every day of the 
last. 

Mr. Cobbett is great in attack, not in de- 
fence : he cannot fight an up-hill battle. He 
will not bear the least punishing. If any one 
turns upon him (which few people like to do) 
he immediately turns tail. Like an overgrown 
school-boy, he is so used to have it all his own 
way, that he cannot submit to any thing like 
competition or a struggle for the mastery ; he 
must lay on all the blows, and take none. He 
is bullying and cowardly ; a Big Ben in politics, 
who will fall upon others and crush them by his 
weight, but is not prepared for resistance, and 
is soon staggered by a few smart blows. When- 
ever he has been set upon, he has slunk out of 



134 CHARACTER OF COBBETT. 

the controversy. The Edinburgh Review made 
(what is called) a dead set at him some years 
ago, to which he only retorted by an eulogy on 
the superior neatness of an English kitchen- 
garden to a Scotch one. I remember going one 
day into a bookseller's shop in Fleet-street to 
ask for the Review ; and on my expressing my 
opinion to a young Scotchman, who stood be- 
hind the counter, that Mr. Cobbett might hit as 
hard in his reply, the North Briton said with 
some alarm — " But you don't think, Sir, Mr. 
Cobbett will be able to injure the Scottish na- 
tion ?" I said I could not speak to that point, 
but I thought he was very well able to defend 
himself. He however did not, but has borne 
a grudge to the Edinburgh Review ever since, 
which he hates worse than the Quarterly. I 
cannot say I do*. 

* Mr. Cobbett speaks almost as well as he writes. The 
only time I ever saw him he seemed to me a very pleasant 
man — easy of access, affable, clear-headed, simple and mild 
in his manner, deliberate and unruffled in his speech, though 
some of his expressions were not very qualified. His figure 
is tall and portly. He has a good sensible face — rather 
full, with little grey eyes, a hard, square forehead, a ruddy 
complexion, with hair grey or powdered ; and had on a scarlet 
broad-cloth waistcoat with the flaps of the pockets hanging 
down, as was the custom for gentlemen-farmers in the last 
century, or as we see it in the pictures of Members of Par- 
liament in the reign of George I. I certainly did not think 
'ess favourably of him for .seciii''' him. 






ESSAY VII. 
ON PEOPLE WITH ONE IDEA. 



ESSAY VII. 

ON PEOPLE WITH ONE IDEA. 



There are people who have but one idea : at 
least, if they have more, they keep it a secret, 
for they never talk but of one subject. 

There is Major C : he has but one idea 

or subject of discourse, Parliamentary Reform. 
Now Parliamentary Reform is (as far as I know) 
a very good thing, a very good idea, and a very 
good subject to talk about : but why should it 
be the only one ? To hear the worthy and gallant 
Major resume his favourite topic, is like law- 
business, or a person who has a suit in Chancery 
going on. Nothing can be attended to, nothing 
can be talked of but that. Now it is getting on, 
now again it is standing still; at one time the 
Master has promised to pass judgment by a 
certain day, at another he has put it off again 
and called for more papers, and both are equally 
reasons for speaking of it. Like the piece 
of packthread in the barrister's hands, Uc turns 



138 ON PEOPLE WITH ONE IDEA. 

and twists it all ways, and cannot proceed 
a step without it. Some school-boys cannot 
read but in their own book : and the man of one 
idea cannot converse out of his own subject. 
Conversation it is not; but a sort of recital of 
the preamble of a bill, or a collection of grave 
arguments for a man's being of opinion with 
himself. It would be well if there was any 
thing of character, of eccentricity in all this ; 
but that is not the case. It is a political homily 
personified, a walking common-place we have to 
encounter and listen to. It is just as if a man 
w r as to insist on your hearing him go through 
the fifth chapter of the Book of Judges every 
time you meet, or like the story of the Cosmo- 
gony in the Vicar of Wakefield. It is a tune 
played on a barrel-organ. It is a common vehicle 
of discourse into which they get and are set 
down when they please, without any pains or 
trouble to themselves. Neither is it profes- 
sional pedantry or trading quackery : it has no 
excuse. The man has no more to do with the 
question which he saddles on all his hearers than 
you have. This is what makes the matter hope- 
less. If a farmer talks to you about his pigs or 
his poultry, or a physician about his patients, or 
a lawyer about his briefs, or a merchant about 
stock, or an author about himself, you know 



ON PEOPLE WITH ONE IDEA. L<><) 

how to account for this, it is a common in- 
firmity, you have a laugh at his expense, and 
there is no more to be said. But here is a man 
who goes out of his way to be absurd, and is 
troublesome by a romantic effort of generosity. 
You cannot say to him, " All this may be in- 
teresting to you, but I have no concern in it:" 
you cannot put him off in that way. He re- 
torts the Latin adage upon you — Nihil humani 
a me alienum puto. He has got possession of a 
subject which is of universal and paramount in- 
terest (not " a fee-grief, due to some single 
breast" ) — and on that plea may hold you by the 
button as long as he chooses. His delight is to 
harangue on what nowise regards himself: how 
then can you refuse to listen to what as little 
amuses you ? Time and tide wait for no man. 
The business of the state admits of no delay. 
The question of Universal Suffrage and Annual 
Parliaments stands first on the order of the day 
— takes precedence in its own right of every 
other question. Any other topic, grave or gay, 
is looked upon in the light of impertinence, 
and sent to Coventry, Business is an interrup- 
tion ; pleasure a digression from it. It is the 
question before every company where the Major 
comes, which immediately resolves itself into a 
committee of the whole world upon it, is carried 



140 ON PEOPLE WITH ONE IDEA. 

on by means of a perpetual virtual adjourn- 
ment, and it is presumed that no other is 
entertained while this is pending — a deter- 
mination which gives its persevering advocate a 
fair prospect of expatiating on it to his dying 
day. As Cicero says of study, it follows him 
into the country, it stays with him at home : it 
sits with him at breakfast, and goes out with 
him to dinner. It is like a part of his dress, of 
the costume of his person, without which he 
would be at a loss what to do. If he meets you 
in the street, he accosts you with it as a form of 
salutation : if you see him at his own house, it is 
supposed you come upon that. If you happen 
to remark, " It is a fine day or the town is full," 
it is considered as a temporary compromise of 
the question ; you are suspected of not going 
the whole length of the principle. As Sancho 
when reprimanded for mentioning his homely 
favourite in the Duke's kitchen, defended him- 
self by saying — " There I thought of Dapple, 
and there I spoke of him" — so the true stickler 
for Reform neglects no opportunity of intro- 
ducing the subject wherever he is. Place its 
veteran champion under the frozen north, and 
lie will celebrate sw r cet smiling Reform : place 
him under the mid-day Afric suns, and he will 
talk of nothing but Reform — Reform so sweetly 



ON PEOPLE WITH ONE IDEA. 141 

smiling and so sweetly promising for the last 
forty years — 

Dulce ridentem Lalagen, 
Dulce loquentem ! 

A topic of this sort of which the person himself 
may be considered as almost sole proprietor and 
patentee is an estate for life, free from all in- 
cumbrance of wit, thought, or study, you live 
upon it as a settled income ; and others might 
as well think to eject you out of a capital free- 
hold house and estate as think to drive you out 
of it into the wide world of common sense and 
argument. Every man's house is his castle ; 
and every man's common-place is his strong- 
hold, from which he looks out and smiles at 
the dust and heat of controversy, raised by a 
number of frivolous and vexatious questions — 
" Rings the world with the vain stir !" A cure 
for this and every other evil would be a Par- 
liamentary Reform ; and so we return in a per- 
petual circle to the point from which we set 
out. Is not this a species of sober madness 
more provoking than the real? Has not the 
theoretical enthusiast his mind as much warped, 
as much enslaved by one idea as the acknow- 
ledged lunatic, only that the former has no 
lucid intervals ? If you see a visionary of this 
class going along the street, you can tell as well 



142 ON PEOPLE WITH ONE IDEA. 

what he is thinking of and will say next as the 
man that fancies himself a tea-pot or the Czar 
of Muscovy. The one is as inaccessible to 
reason as the other : if the one raves, the other 
dotes ! 

There are some who fancy the Corn Bill the 
root of all evil, and others who trace all the 
miseries of life to the practice of muffling up 
children in night-clothes when they sleep or 
travel. They will declaim by the hour together 
on the first, and argue themselves black in the 
face on the last. It is in vain that you give up 
the point. They persist in the debate, and 
begin again — •" But don't you see — ?" These 
sort of partial obliquities, as they are more en- 
tertaining and original, are also by their nature 
intermittent. They hold a man but for a season. 
He may have one a year or every two years ; 
and though, while he is in the heat of any new 
discovery, he will let you hear of nothing else, 
he varies from himself, and is amusing unde- 
signedly. He is not like the chimes at mid- 
night. 

People of the character here spoken of, that is, 
who tease you to death with some one idea, ge- 
nerally differ in their favourite notion from the 
rest of the world ; and indeed it is the love of 
distinction which is mostly at the bottom of this 



ON PEOPLE WITH ONE IDEA. 143 

peculiarity. Thus one person is remarkable for 
living on a vegetable diet, and never fails to 
entertain you all dinner-time with an invective 
against animal food. One of this self-denying 
class, who adds to the primitive simplicity of 
this sort of food the recommendation of having 
it in a raw state, lamenting the death of a pa- 
tient whom he had augured to be in a good 
way as a convert to his system, at last accounted 
for his disappointment in a whisper — " But she 
ate meat privately, depend upon it." It is not 
pleasant, though it is what one submits to 
willingly from some people, to be asked every 
time you meet, whether you have quite left off 
drinking wine, and to be complimented or con- 
doled with on your looks according as you 
answer in the negative or affirmative. Aber- 
nethy thinks his pill an infallible cure for all 
disorders. A person once complaining to his 
physician that he thought his mode of treat- 
ment had not answered, he assured him it was 
the best in the world, — " and as a proof of it," 
says he, "I have had one gentleman, a patient 
with your disorder, under the same regimen for 
the last sixteen years !" — I have known persons 
whose minds were entirely taken up at all times 
and on all occasions with such questions as the 
Abolition of the Slave-Trade, the Restoration 




144 ON PEOPLE WITH ONE IDEA. 

of the Jews, or the progress of Unitarianism. 
I myself at one period took a pretty strong 
turn to inveighing against the doctrine of 
Divine Right, and am not yet cured of my 
prejudice on that subject. How many pro- 
jectors have gone mad in good earnest from in- 
cessantly harping on one idea, the discovery of 
the philosopher's stone, the finding out the lon- 
gitude, or paying off the national debt ! The 
disorder at length comes to a fatal crisis ; but 
long before this, and while they were walking 
about and talking as usual, the derangement of 
the fancy, the loss of all voluntary power to 
control or alienate their ideas from the single 
subject that occupied them, was gradually 
taking place, and overturning the fabric of the 
understanding by wrenching it all on one side. 
Alderman Wood has, I should suppose, talked 
of nothing but the Queen in all companies for 
the last six months. Happy Alderman Wood ! 
Some persons have got a definition of the verb, 
others a system of short-hand, others a cure for 
typhus fever, others a method for preventing the 
counterfeiting of bank notes, which they think 
the best possible, and indeed the only one. 
Others insist there have been only three great 
men in the world, leaving you to add a fourth. 
A man who has been in Germany will some- 



ON PEOPLE WITH ONE IDEA. 1 \5 

times talk of nothing but what is German : a 
Scotchman always leads the discourse to his 
own country. Some descant on the Kantean 
philosophy. There is a conceited fellow about 
town w T ho talks always and every where on this 
subject. He wears the Categories round his 
neck like a pearl-chain : he plays off the names 
of the primary and transcendental qualities like 
rings on his fingers. He talks of the Kantean 
system while he dances ; he talks of it while 
he dines, he talks of it to his children, to his 
apprentices, to his customers. He called on 
me to convince me of it, and said I was only 
prevented from becoming a complete convert 
by one or two prejudices. He knows no more 
about it than a pike-staff. Why then does he 
make so much ridiculous fuss about it ? It is 
not that he has got this one idea in his head, 
but that he has got no other. A dunce may 
talk on the subject of the Kantean philosophy 
with great impunity : if he opened his lips on 
any other, he might be found out. A French 
lady, who had married an Englishman who said 
little, excused him by saying — " He is always 
thinking of Locke and Newton." This is one 
way of passing muster by following in the state 
of great names ! — A friend of mine, whom I met 
one day in the street, accosted me with mor< 

i. 



146 ON PEOPLE WITH ONE IDEA. 

than usual vivacity, and said, " Well, we're 
selling, we're selling !" I thought he meant 
a house. " No," he said, £ haven't you seen 
the advertisement in the newspapers ? I mean 
five-and-twenty copies of the Essay." This 
work, a comely, capacious quarto on the most 
abstruse metaphysics, had occupied his sole 
thoughts for several years, and lie concluded 
that I must be thinking of what he was. I be- 
lieve, however, I may say I am nearly the only 
person that ever read, certainly that ever pre- 
tended to understand it. It is an original and 
most ingenious work, nearly as incomprehen- 
sible as it is original, and as quaint as it is in- 
genious. If the author is taken up with the 
ideas in his own head and no others, he has a 
right : for he has ideas there, that are to be 
met with nowhere else, and which occasionally 
would not disgrace a Berkeley. A dextrous 
plagiarist might get himself an immense repu- 
tation by putting them in a popular dress. Oh ! 
how little do they know, who have never done 
any thing but repeat after others by rote, the 
pangs, the labour, the yearnings and misgivings 
of mind it costs, to get at the germ of an ori- 
ginal idea — to dig it out of the hidden re- 
cesses of thought and nature, and bring it half- 
ashamed, struggling, and deformed into the day 



ON PEOPLE WITH ONE IDEA. 147 

— to give words and intelligible symbols to that 
which was never imagined or expressed before ! 
It is as if the dumb should speak for the first 
time, as if things should stammer out their own 
meaning, through the imperfect organs of mere 
sense. I wish that some of our fluent, plausible 
declaimers, who have such store of words to 
cover the want of ideas, could lend their art to 
this writer. If he, " poor, unfledged" in this 
respect, " who has scarce winged from view 
o' th' nest," could find a language for his ideas, 
truth would find a language for some of her 
secrets. Mr. Fearn was buried in the woods 
of Indostan. In his leisure from business and 
from tiger-shooting, he took it into his head to 
look into his own mind. A whim or tw T o, an 
odd fancy, like a film before the eye, now and 
then crossed it : it struck him as something 
curious, but the impression at first disappeared 
like breath upon glass. He thought no more 
of it j yet still the same conscious feelings re- 
turned, and what at first was chance or instinct, 
became a habit. Several notions had taken 
possession of his brain relating to mental pro- 
cesses which he had never heard alluded to in 
conversation, but not being well versed in such 
matters, he did not know whether they were to 
be found in learned authors or not. He took a 

i % 



148 ON TEOPLE WITH ONE IDEA. 

journey to the capital of the Peninsula on pur- 
pose, bought Locke, Reid, Stewart, and Berkeley, 
whom he consulted with eager curiosity when 
he got home, but did not find what he looked 
for. He set to work himself; and in a few r 
weeks, sketched out a rough draught of his 
thoughts and observations on bamboo paper. 
The eagerness of his new pursuit, together with 
the diseases of the climate, proved too much 
for his constitution, and he was forced to re- 
turn to this country. He put his metaphysics, 
his bamboo manuscript, into the boat with him, 
and as he floated down the Ganges, said to 
himself, " If I live, this will live : if I die, it 
will not be heard of." What is fame to this 
feeling ? The babbling of an idiot ! He brought 
the work home with him, and twice had it 
stereotyped. The first sketch he allowed was 
obscure, but the improved copy he thought 
could not fail to strike. It did not succeed. 
The world, as Goldsmith said of himself, made 
a point of taking no notice of it. Ever since 
he has had nothing but disappointment and 
vexation — the greatest and most heart-breaking 
of all others — that of not being able to make 
yourself understood. Mr. Fearn tells me there 
is a sensible writer in the Monthly Review who 
sees the tiling in its proper light, and says so. 






ON PEOPLE WITH ONE IDEA. 149 

But I have heard of no other instance. There 
are notwithstanding ideas in this work, neglected 
and ill-treated as it has been, that lead to more 
curious and subtle speculations on some of the 
most disputed and difficult points of the phi- 
losophy of the human mind (such as relation, 
abstraction, &c.) than have been thrown out in 
any work for the last sixty years, I mean since 
Hume ; for since his time, there has been no 
metaphysician in this country, worth the name. 
Yet his Treatise on Human Nature, he tells us, 
" fell still-born from the press." So it is 
that knowledge works its way, and reputation 
lingers far behind it. But truth is better than 
opinion, I maintain it ; and as to the two stereo- 
typed and unsold editions of the Essay on Con- 
sciousness, I say, Honi soit qui mat y pense * /— 
My Uncle Toby had one idea in his head, that 
of his bowling-green, and another, that of the 
Widow Wadman. Oh, spare them both ! I 
will only add one more anecdote in illustration 
of this theory of the mind's being occupied with 

* Quarto poetry, us well as quarto metaphysics, does not 
always sell. Going one day into a shop in Paternoster-row 
to see for some lines in Mr. Wordsworth's Excursion to 
interlard some prose with, I applied to the constituted au- 
thorities, and asked if I could look at a copy of the Excur 
sion? The answer was — " Into which county, Sir?"' 



150 ON PEOPLE WITH ONE IDEA. 

one idea, which is most frequently of a man's 
self. A celebrated lyrical writer happened to 
drop into a small party where they had just got 
the novel of Rob Roy, by the author of Waverley. 
The motto in the title-page was taken from a 
poem of his. This w r as a hint sufficient, a word 
to the wise. He instantly went to the book- 
shelf in the next room, took down the volume 
of his own poems, read the whole of that in 
question aloud with manifest complacency, re- 
placed it on the shelf, and walked away; taking- 
no more notice of Rob Roy than if there had 
been no such person, nor of the new novel than 
if it had not been written by its renowned au- 
thor. There was no reciprocity in this. But 
the writer in question does not admit of any 
merit, second to his own*. 

* These fantastic poets are like a foolish ringer at Ply- 
mouth that Northcote tells the story of. He was proud of 
his ringing, and the boys who made a jest of his foible used 
to get him in the belfry, and ask him, " Well now, John, 
how many good ringers are there in Plymouth ?" ' < Two," 
he would say, without any hesitation. " Ay, indeed ! and 
who are they?" — " Why, first, there's myself, that's one; 

and — and" " Well, and who's the other?" — « Why, 

there's, there's Ecod, I can't think of any other but 

myself." Talk tve of one Master Laimcelot. The story is 
of ringers: it will do for any vain, shallow, self-satisfied 
egotist of them all. 



ON PEOPLE WITH ONE IDEA. 151 

Mr. Owen is a man remarkable for one idea. 
It is that of himself and the Lanark cotton- 
mills. He carries this idea backwards and for- 
wards with him from Glasgow to London, with- 
out allowing any thing for attrition, and expects 
to find it in the same state of purity and perfec- 
tion in the latter place as at the former. He ac- 
quires a wonderful velocity and impenetrability 
in his undaunted transit. Resistance to him is 
vain, while the whirling motion of the mail-coach 
remains in his head. 

M Nor Alps nor Apennines can keep liim out, 
Nor fortified redoubt." 

He even got possession, in the suddenness of his 
onset, of the steam-engine of the Times News- 
paper, and struck off ten thousand wood-cuts of 
the Projected Villages, which afforded an ocular 
demonstration to all who saw them of the prac- 
ticability of Mr. Owen's whole scheme. He 
comes into a room with one of these documents 
in his hand, with the air of a schoolmaster and 
a quack-doctor mixed, asks very kindly how you 
do, and on hearing you are still in an indifferent 
state of health owing to bad digestion, instantly 
turns round, and observes, " That all that will 
be remedied in his plan : that indeed he thinks 
too much attention has been paid to the mind, 



\5°2 ON PEOPLE WITH ONE IDEA. 

and not enough to the body ; that in his system, 
which he has nowperfected and which wilJ shortly 
be generally adopted, he has provided effectually 
for both : that he has been long of opinion that 
the mind depends altogether on the physical 
organisation, and where the latter is neglected 
or disordered, the former must languish and 
want its due vigour : that exercise is therefore 
a part of his system, with full liberty to develop 
every faculty of mind and body : that two ob- 
jections had been made to his New View of 
Society, viz. its want of relaxation from labour, 
and its want of variety ; but the first of these, 
the too great restraint, he trusted he had already 
answered, for where the powers of mind and 
body were freely exercised and brought out, 
surely liberty must be allowed to exist in the 
highest degree ; and as to the second, the mo- 
notony which would be produced by a regular 
and general plan of co-operation, he conceived 
he had proved in his " New View" and " Ad- 
dresses to the higher Classes;" that the co-opera- 
tion he had recommended was necessarily con- 
ducive to the most extensive improvement of 
the ideas and faculties, and where this was the 
case, there must be the greatest possible variety 
instead of a want of it." And having said this, 
this exeprt and sweeping orator lakes up his 



ON PEOPLE WITH ONE IDEA. 153 

hat and walks down stairs after reading his lec- 
ture of truisms like a play-bill or an apothecary's 
advertisement ; and should you stop him at the 
door to say by way of putting in a word in 
common, that Mr. Southey seems somewhat 
favourable to his plan in his late Letter to Mr. 
William Smith, he looks at you with a smile of 
pity at the futility of all opposition and the idle- 
ness of all encouragement. People who thus 
swell out some vapid scheme of their own into 
undue importance, seem to me to labour under 
water in the head — to exhibit a huge hydroce- 
phalus ! They may be very worthy people for 
all that, but they are bad companions and very 
indifferent reasoners. Tom Moore says of some 
one somewhere, " That he puts his hand in his 
breeches' pocket like a crocodile." The phrase 
is hieroglyphical : but Mr. Owen and others 
might be said to put their foot in the question 
of social improvement and reform much in the 
same unaccountable manner. 

I hate to be surfeited with any thing, how- 
ever sweet. I do not want to be always tied to 
the same question, as if there were no other in 
the world. I like a mind more Catholic. 

" I love to talk with mariners, 
That come from a far countree." 



154 ON PEOPLE WITH ONE IDEA. 

I am not for " a collusion" but " an ex- 
change" of ideas. It is well to hear what other 
people have to say on a number of subjects. I 
do not wish to be always respiring the same con- 
fined atmosphere, but to vary the scene, and get 
a little relief and fresh air out of doors. Do all 
we can to shake it off, there is always enough 
pedantry, egotism, and self-conceit left lurking 
behind : we need not seal ourselves up herme- 
tically in these precious qualities ; so as to think 
of nothing but our own wonderful discoveries, 
and hear nothing but the sound of our own voice. 
Scholars, like princes, may learn something by 
being incognito. Yet we see those who cannot 
go into a bookseller's shop, or bear to be five 
minutes in a stage-coach, without letting you 
know who they are. They carry their reputation 
about with them as the snail does its shell, and 
sit under its canopy, like the lady in the lobster. 
I cannot understand this at all. What is the 
use of a man's always revolving round his own 
little circle? He must, one should think, be 
tired of it himself, as well as tire other people. 
A well-known writer says with much boldness 
both in the thought and expression, that " a 
Lord is imprisoned in the Bastille of a name, and 
cannot enlarge himself into man :" and I have 
known men of genius in the same predicament. 



ON PEOPLE WITH ONE IDEA. 155 

Why must a man be for ever mouthing out his 
own poetry, comparing himself with Milton, 
passage by passage, and weighing every line in 
a balance of posthumous fame which he holds in 
his own hands ? It argues a want of imagination 
as well as common sense. Has he no ideas but 
what he has put into verse ; or none in common 
with his hearers? Why should he think it the 
only scholar-like thing, the only " virtue extant" 
to see the merit of his writings, and that " men 
were brutes without them ?" Why should he 
bear a grudge to all art, to all beauty, to all 
wisdom that does not spring from his own brain ? 
Or why should he fondly imagine that there is 
but one fine thing in the world, namely poetry, 
and that he is the only poet in it ? It will never 
do. Poetry is a very fine thing ; but there are 
other things besides it. Every thing must have 
its turn. Does a wise man think to enlarge his 
comprehension by turning his eyes only on him- 
self, or hope to conciliate the admiration of 
others by scouting, proscribing, and loathing all 
that they delight in ? He must either have a dis- 
proportionate idea of himself, or be ignorant of 
the world in which he lives. It is quite enough 
to have one class of people born to think the 
universe made for them ! — It seems also to argue 
a want of repose, of confidence, and firm faith 



156 ON PEOPLE WITH ONE IDEA. 

in a man's real pretensions to be always drag- 
ging them forward into the fore-ground, as if 
the proverb held here — Out of sight out of mind. 
Does he, for instance, conceive that no one 
would ever think of his poetry, unless he forced 
it upon them by repeating it himself? Does 
he believe all competition, all allowance of 
another's merit fatal to him ? Must he, like 
Moody in the Country Girl, lock up the facul- 
ties of his admirers in ignorance of all other fine 
things, painting, music, the antique, lest they 
should play truant to him? Methinks such a 
proceeding implies no good opinion of his own 
genius or their taste : — it is deficient in dignity 
and in decorum. Surely if any one is con- 
vinced of the reality of an acquisition, he can 
bear not to have it spoken of every minute. If 
he knows he has an undoubted superiority in any 
respect, he will not be uneasy because every one 
he meets is not in the secret, nor staggered by the 
report of rival excellence. One of the first mathe- 
maticians and classical scholars of the day was 
mentioning it as a compliment to himself that a 
cousin of his, a girl from school, had said of him 

— " You know M is a very plain good sort 

of a young man, but he is not any thing at all out 
of the common." L. H. once said to me — " I 
wonder I never heard you speak upon this sub- 






OX PEOPLE WITH OXE IDEA. 1 . "T 

ject before, which you seem to have studied a 
good deal." I answered, " Why, we were not 

reduced to that, that I know of!" ■ 

There are persons, who without being charge- 
able with the vice here spoken of, yet " stand 
accountant for as great a sin :" though not dull 
and monotonous, they are vivacious mannerists 
in their conversation, and excessive egotists. 
Though they run over a thousand subjects in 
mere gaiety of heart, their delight still flows 
from one idea, namely, themselves. Open the 
book in what page you will, there is a frontis- 
piece of themselves staring you in the face. 
They are a sort of Jacks o 9 the Green, with a 
sprig of laurel, a little tinsel, and a little smut, 
but still playing antics and keeping in incessant 
motion, to attract attention and extort your 
pittance of approbation. Whether they talk of 
the town or the country, poetry or politics, it 
comes to much the same thing. If they talk to 
you of the town, its diversions, " its palaces, its 
ladies, and its streets," they are the delight, 
the grace, and ornament of it. If they are de- 
scribing the charms of the country, they give 
no account of any individual spot or object or 
source of pleasure but the circumstance of 
their being there. " With them conversing, we 
forget all place, all seasons, and their change." 



158 ON PEOPLE WITH ONE IDEA. 

They perhaps pluck a leaf or a flower, patronise 
it, and hand it you to admire, but select no one 
feature of beauty or grandeur to dispute the 
palm of perfection with their own persons. 
Their rural descriptions are mere landscape 
back-grounds with their own portraits in an 
engaging attitude in front. They are not ob- 
serving or enjoying the scene, but doing the 
honours as masters of the ceremonies to nature, 
and arbiters of elegance to all humanity. If 
they tell a love-tale of enamoured princesses, it 
is plain they fancy themselves the hero of the 
piece. If they discuss poetry, their encomiums 
still turn on something genial and unsophisti- 
cated, meaning their own style : if they enter 
into politics, it is understood that a hint from 
them to the potentates of Europe is sufficient. 
In short, as a lover (talk of what you will) brings 
in his mistress at every turn, so these persons 
contrive to divert your attention to the same 
darling object — they are, in fact, in love with 
themselves ; and like lovers, should be left to 
keep their own company. 



ESSAY VIII 



ON THE 



IGNORANCE OF THE LEARNED. 



ESSAY VIII. 
ON THE IGNORANCE OF THE LEARNED. 



" For the more languages a man can speak, 
His talent has but sprung the greater leak : 
And, for the industry he has spent upon't, 
Must full as much some other way discount. 
The Hebrew, Chaldee, and the Syriac, 
Do, like their letters, set men's reason back, 

' And turn their wits that strive to understand it 
(Like those that write the characters) left-handed. 
Yet he that is but able to express 
No sense at all in several languages, 
Will pass for learneder than he that's known 
To speak the strongest reason in his own." 

Butler. 

The description of persons who have the fewest 
ideas of all others are mere authors and readers. 
It is better to be able neither to read nor write 
than to be able to do nothing else. A lounger 
who is ordinarily seen with a book in his hand, 
is (we may be almost sure) equally without the 
power or inclination to attend either to what 
passes around him, or in his own mind. Such 

M 



16£ ON THE IGNORANCE OF THE LEARNED. 

a one may be said to carry his understanding 
about with him in his pocket, or to leave it at 
home on his library shelves. He is afraid of 
venturing on any train of reasoning, or of 
striking out any observation that is not me- 
chanically suggested to him by passing his eyes 
over certain legible characters ; shrinks from 
the fatigue of thought, which, for want of prac- 
tice, becomes insupportable to him ; and sits 
down contented with an endless wearisome suc- 
cession of words and half-formed images, which 
fill the void of the mind, and continually efface 
one another. Learning is, in too many cases, 
but a foil to common sense ; a substitute for 
true knowledge. Books are less often made 
use of as " spectacles" to look at nature with, 
than as blinds to keep out its strong light and 
shifting scenery from weak eyes and indolent 
dispositions. The book-worm wraps himself up 
in his web of verbal generalities, and sees only 
the glimmering shadows of things reflected from 
the minds of others. Nature puts him out. 
The impressions of real objects, stripped of the 
disguises of words and voluminous round-about 
descriptions, are blows that stagger him ; their 
variety distracts, their rapidity exhausts him ; 
and he turns from the bustle, the noise, and glare, 
and whirling motion of the world about him 



ON THE IGNORANCE OF THE LEARNED. l6«S 

(which he has not an eye to follow in its fan- 
tastic changes, nor an understanding to reduce 
to fixed principles,) to the quiet monotony of 
the dead languages, and the less startling and 
more intelligible combinations of the letters of 
the alphabet. It is well, it is perfectly well. 
" Leave me to my repose," is the motto of the 
sleeping and the dead. You might as well ask 
the paralytic to leap from his chair and throw 
away his crutch, or, without a miracle, to " take 
up his bed and walk," as expect the learned 
reader to throw down his book and think for 
himself. He clings to it for his intellectual 
support ; and his dread of being left to himself 
is like the horror of a vacuum. He can only 
breathe a learned atmosphere, as other men 
breathe common air. He is a borrower of 
sense. He has no ideas of his own, and must 
live on those of other people. The habit of 
supplying our ideas from foreign sources " en- 
feebles all internal strength of thought," as a 
course of dram-drinking destroys the tone of 
the stomach. The faculties of the mind, when 
not exerted, or when cramped by custom ami 
authority, become listless, torpid, and unfit for 
the purposes of thought or action. Can we 
wonder at the languor and lassitude which is 
thus produced by a life oi^ learned sloth and 

M ~2 



164 ON THE IGNORANCE OF THE LEARNED. 

ignorance ; by poring over lines and syllables 
that excite little more idea or interest than if 
they were the characters of an unknown tongue, 
till the eye closes on vacancy, and the book 
drops from the feeble hand! I would rather 
be a wood-cutter, or the meanest hind, that 
all day " sweats in the eye of Phoebus, and at 
night sleeps in Elysium," than wear out my life 
so, *twixt dreaming and awake. The learned 
author differs from the learned student in 
this, that the one transcribes what the other 
reads. The learned are mere literary drudges. 
If you set them upon original composition, 
their heads turn, they don't know where they 
are. The indefatigable readers of books are 
like the everlasting copiers of pictures, who, 
when they attempt to do any thing of their 
own, find they want an eye quick enough, a 
hand steady enough, and colours bright enough, 
to trace the living forms of nature. 

Any one who has passed through the regular 
gradations of a classical education, and is not 
made a fool by it, may consider himself as having 
had a very narrow escape. It is an old remark, 
that boys who shine at school do not make the 
greatest figure when they grow up and come 
out into the world. The things, in fact, which 
a boy is set to learn at school, and on which his 



ON THE IGNORANCE OF THE LEARNED. l6o> 

success depends, are things which do not require 
the exercise either of the highest or the most 
useful faculties of the mind. Memory (and that 
of the lowest kind) is the chief faculty called 
into play, in conning over and repeating lessons 
by rote in grammar, in languages, in geography, 
arithmetic, &c. so that he who has the most of 
this technical memory, with the least turn for 
other things, which have a stronger and more 
natural claim upon his childish attention, will 
make the most forward school-boy. The jargon 
containing the definitions of the parts of speech, 
the rules for casting up an account, or the in- 
flections of a Greek verb, can have no attraction 
to the tyro of ten years old, except as they are 
imposed as a task upon him by others, or from 
his feeling the want of sufficient relish or amuse- 
ment in other things. A lad with a sickly con- 
stitution, and no very active mind, who can just 
retain what is pointed out to him, and has neither 
sagacity to distinguish nor spirit to enjoy for 
himself, will generally be at the head of his 
form. An idler at school, on the other hand, is 
one who has high health and spirits, who has 
the free use of his limbs, with all his wits about 
him, who feels the circulation of his blood and 
the motion of his heart, who is ready to laugh 
and cry in a breath, and who had rather chase 



166 ON THE IGNORANCE OF THE LEARNED. 

a ball or a butterfly, feel the open air in his 
face, look at the fields or the sky, follow a wind- 
ing path, or enter with eagerness into all the 
little conflicts and interests of his acquaintances 
and friends, than doze over a musty spelling- 
book, repeat barbarous distichs after his master, 
sit so many hours pinioned to a writing-desk, 
and receive his reward for the loss of time and 
pleasure in paltry prize-medals at Christinas 
and Midsummer. There is indeed a degree of 
stupidity which prevents children from learning 
the usual lessons, or ever arriving at these puny 
academic honours. But what passes for stu- 
pidity is much often er a want of interest, of a 
sufficient motive to fix the attention, and force 
a reluctant application to the dry and unmean- 
ing pursuits of school-learning. The best ca- 
pacities are as much above this drudgery, as the 
dullest are beneath it. Our men of the greatest 
genius have not been most distinguished for 
their acquirements at school or at the university. 

" Th* enthusiast Fancy was a truant ever." 

Gray and Collins were among the instances 
of this wayward disposition. Such persons do 
not think so highly of the advantages, nor can 
they submit their imaginations so servilely to the 
trammels of strict scholastic discipline. There 



ON THE IGNORANCE OF THE LEARNED. iGj 

is a certain kind and degree of intellect in which 
words take root, but into which things have not 
power to penetrate. A mediocrity of talent, with 
a certain slenderness of moral constitution, is 
the soil that produces the most brilliant speci- 
mens of successful prize-essayists and Greek 
epigrammatists. It should not be forgotten, 
that the least respectable character among mo- 
dern politicians was the cleverest boy at Eaton. 
Learning is the knowledge of that which is 
not generally known to others, and which we 
can only derive at second-hand from books or 
other artificial sources. The knowledge of that 
which is before us, or about us, which appeals 
to our experience, passions, and pursuits, to the 
bosoms and businesses of men, is not learning. 
Learning is the knowledge of that which none 
but the learned know. He is the most learned 
man who knows the most of what is farthest 
removed from common life and actual observa- 
tion, that is of the least practical utility, and 
least liable to be brought to the test of ex- 
perience, and that, having been handed down 
through the greatest number of intermediate 
stages, is the most full of uncertainty, difficulties, 
and contradictions. It is seeing witli the eyes 
of others, hearing with their ears, and pinning 
our faith on their understandings. The learned 



168 ON THE IGNORANCE OF THE LEARNED. 

man prides himself in the knowledge of names, 
and dates, not of men or things. He thinks 
and cares nothing about his next-door neigh- 
bours, but he is deeply read in the tribes and 
casts of the Hindoos and Calmuc Tartars. He 
can hardly find his way into the next street, 
though he is acquainted with the exact dimen- 
sions of Constantinople and Pekin. He does 
not know whether his oldest acquaintance is a 
knave or a fool, but he can pronounce a pompous 
lecture on all the principal characters in history. 
He cannot tell whether an object is black or 
white, round or square, and yet he is a professed 
master of the laws of optics and the rules of 
perspective. He knows as much of what he 
talks about, as a blind man does of colours. He 
cannot give a satisfactory answer to the plainest 
question, nor is he ever in the right in any one 
of his opinions, upon any one matter of fact 
that really comes before him, and yet he gives 
himself out for an infallible judge on all those 
points, of which it is impossible that he or any 
other person living should know any thing but 
by conjecture. He is expert in all the dead 
and in most of the living languages; but he 
can neither speak his own fluently, nor write it 
correctly. A person of this class, the second 
Greek scholar pf his day, undertook to point 



ON THE IGNORANCE OF THE LEARNED. 169 

out several solecisms in Milton's Latin style ; 
and in his own performance there is hardly a 
sentence of common English. Such was Dr. 
. Such is Dr. . Such was not 



Porson. He was an exception that confirmed 
the general rule, — a man that, by uniting talents 
and knowledge with learning, made the distinc- 
tion between them more striking and palpable. 

A mere scholar, who knows nothing but books, 
must be ignorant even of them. " Books do 
not teach the use of books." How should he 
know any thing of a work, who knows nothing 
of the subject of it? The learned pedant is 
conversant with books only as they are made of 
other books, and those again of others, without 
end. He parrots those who have parroted 
others. He can translate the same word into 
ten different languages, but he knows nothing 
of the thing which it means in any one of them. 
He stuffs his head with authorities built on au- 
thorities, with quotations quoted from quota- 
tions, while he locks up his senses, his under- 
standing, and his heart. He is unacquainted 
with the maxims and manners of the world; he 
is to seek in the characters of individuals. He 
sees no beauty in the face of nature or of art. 
To him " the mighty world of eye and car" is 
hid , and " knowledge," except at one entrance, 



170 ON THE IGNORANCE OF THE LEARNED. 

" quite shut out." His pride takes part with 
his ignorance ; and his self-importance rises 
with the number of things of which he does not 
know the value, and which he therefore despises 
as unworthy of his notice. He knows nothing 
of pictures ; — " of the colouring of Titian, the 
grace of Raphael, the purity of Domenichino, 
the corregiescity of Correggio, the learning of 
Poussin, the airs of Guido, the taste of the 
Caracci, or the grand contour of Michael An- 
gelo," — of all those glories of the Italian and 
miracles of the Flemish school, which have filled 
the eyes of mankind with delight, and to the 
study and imitation of which thousands have in 
vain devoted their lives. These are to him as 
if they had never been, a mere dead letter, a 
bye-word ; and no wonder : for he neither sees 
nor understands their prototypes in nature. A 
print of Rubens's Watering-place, or Claude's 
Enchanted Castle, may be hanging on the walls 
of his room for months without his once per- 
ceiving them ; and if you point them out to 
him, he will turn away from them. The lan- 
guage of nature, or of art (which is another 
nature), is one that he does not understand. He 
repeats indeed the names of Apelles and Phidias, 
because they are to be found in classic authors, 
and boasts of their works as prodigies, because 



ON THE IGNORANCE OF THE LEARNED. 171 

they no longer exist ; or when he sees the finest 
remains of Grecian art actually before him in 
the Elgin marbles, takes no other interest in 
them than as they lead to a learned dispute, 
and (which is the same thing) a quarrel about 
the meaning of a Greek particle. He is equally 
ignorant of music ; he " knows no touch of it," 
from the strains of the all-accomplished Mozart 
to the shepherd's pipe upon the mountain. His 
ears are nailed to his books ; and deadened with 
the sound of the Greek and Latin tongues, and 
the din and smithery of school-learning. Does 
he know anything more of poetry? He knows the 
number of feet in a verse, and of acts in a play ; 
but of the soul or spirit he knows nothing. He 
can turn a Greek ode into English, or a Latin 
epigram into Greek verse, but whether either 
is worth the trouble, he leaves to the critics. 
Does he understand " the act and practique part 
of life" better than " the theorique?" No. He 
knows no liberal or mechanic art ; no trade or 
occupation ; no game of skill or chance. Learn- 
ing " has no skill in surgery," in agriculture, in 
building, in working in wood or in iron ; it can- 
not make any instrument of labour, or use it 
when made ; it cannot handle the plough or the 
spade, or the chisel or the hammer; it knows 
nothing of hunting or hawking, fishing or shoot- 



172 ON THE IGNORANCE OF THE LEARNED. 

ing, of horses or dogs, of fencing or dancing, or 
cudgel-playing, or bowls, or cards, or tennis, or 
any thing else. The learned professor of all 
arts and sciences cannot reduce any one of them 
to practice, though he may contribute an ac- 
count of them to an Encyclopaedia. He has 
not the use of his hands or of his feet ; he can 
neither run, nor walk, nor swim ; and he con- 
siders all those who actually understand and can 
exercise any of these arts of body or mind, as 
vulgar and mechanical men ; — though to know 
almost any one of them in perfection requires 
long time and practice, with powers originally 
fitted, and a turn of mind particularly devoted 
to them. It does not require more than this to 
enable the learned candidate to arrive, by pain- 
ful study, at a doctor's degree and a fellowship, 
and to eat, drink, and sleep, the rest of his life ! 
The thing is plain. All that men really 
understand, is confined to a very small compass ; 
to their daily affairs and experience ; to what 
they have an opportunity to know, and motives 
to study or practise. The rest is affectation 
and imposture. The common people have the 
use of their limbs ; for they live by their labour 
or skill. They understand their own business, 
and the characters of those they have to deal 
with y for it is necessary that they should. They 



ON THE IGNORANCE OF THE LEARNED. 173 

have eloquence to express their passions, and 
wit at will to express their contempt and pro- 
voke laughter. Their natural use of speech is 
not hung up in monumental mockery, in an ob- 
solete language ; nor is their sense of what is 
ludicrous, or readiness at finding out allusions 
to express it, buried in collections of Anas. You 
will hear more good things on the outside of a 
stage-coach from London to Oxford, than if 
you were to pass a twelvemonth with the under- 
graduates, or heads of colleges, of that famous 
university; and more home truths are to be 
learnt from listening to a noisy debate in an ale- 
house, than from attending to a formal one in the 
House of Commons. An elderly country gentle- 
woman will often know more of character, and be 
able to illustrate it by more amusing anecdotes 
taken from the history of what has been said, 
done, and gossiped in a country town for the 
last fifty years, than the best blue-stocking of 
the age will be able to glean from that sort of 
learning which consists in an acquaintance with 
all the novels and satirical poems published in 
the same period. People in towns, indeed, are 
woefully deficient in a knowledge of character, 
which they see only in the bust, not as a whole- 
length. People in the country not only know 
all that has happened to a man, but trace his 



174> ON THE IGNORANCE OF THE LEARNED. 

virtues or vices, as they do his features, in their 
descent through several generations, and solve 
some contradiction in his behaviour by a cross 
in the breed, half a century ago. The learned 
know nothing of the matter, either in town or 
country. Above all, the mass of society have 
common sense, which the learned in all ages 
want. The vulgar are in the right when they 
judge for themselves ; they are wrong when 
they trust to their blind guides. The celebrated 
nonconformist divine, Baxter, was almost stoned 
to death by the good women of Kidderminster, 
for asserting from the pulpit that " hell was 
paved with infants' skulls j" but, by the force 
of argument, and of learned quotations from 
the Fathers, the reverend preacher at length 
prevailed over the scruples of his congregation, 
and over reason and humanity. 

Such is the use which has been made of 
human learning. The labourers in this vine- 
yard seem as if it was their object to confound 
all common sense, and the distinctions of good 
and evil, by means of traditional maxims, and 
preconceived notions, taken upon trust, and 
increasing in absurdity, with increase of age. 
They pile hypothesis on hypothesis, mountain 
high, till it is impossible to come at the plain 
truth on any question. They see things, not as 



ON THE IGNORANCE OF THE LEARNED. 175 

they are, but as they find them in books ; and 
" wink and shut their apprehensions up," in 
order that they may discover nothing to inter- 
fere with their prejudices, or convince them 
of their absurdity. It might be supposed, that 
the height of human wisdom consisted in main- 
taining contradictions, and rendering nonsense 
sacred. There is no dogma, however fierce or 
foolish, to which these persons have not set their 
seals, and tried to impose on the understand- 
ings of their followers, as the will of Heaven, 
clothed with all the terrors and sanctions of 
religion. How little has the human under- 
standing been directed to find out the true and 
useful ! How much ingenuity has been thrown 
away in the defence of creeds and systems! 
How much time and talents have been wasted 
in theological controversy, in law, in politics, in 
verbal criticism, in judicial astrology, and in 
finding out the art of making gold ! What actual 
benefit do we reap from the writings of a Laud 
or a Whitgift, or of Bishop Bull or Bishop Water- 
land, or Prideaux' Connections, or Beausobre, 
or Calmet, or St. Augustine, or Puffendorf, or 
Vattel, or from the more literal but equally 
learned and unprofitable labours of Scaliger, 
Cardan, and Scioppius ? How many grains of 
sense are there in their thousand folio or quarto 



1J6 ON THE IGNORANCE OF THE LEARNED. 

volumes ? What would the world lose if they 
were committed to the flames to-morrow ? Or 
are they not already " gone to the vault of all 
the Capulets ?" Yet all these were oracles in 
their time, and would have scoffed at you or 
me, at common sense and human nature, for 
differing with them. It is our turn to laugh 
now. 

To conclude this subject. The most sensible 
people to be met with in society are men of 
business and of the world, who argue from what 
they see and know, instead of spinning cobweb 
distinctions of what things ought to be. Women 
have often more of what is called good sense 
than men. They have fewer pretensions ; are 
less implicated in theories ; and judge of objects 
more from their immediate and involuntary im- 
pression on the mind, and, therefore, more truly 
and naturally. They cannot reason wrong ; for 
they do not reason at all. They do not think 
or speak by rule ; and they have in general 
more eloquence and wit, as well as sense, on 
that account. By their wit, sense, and elo- 
quence together, they generally contrive to go- 
vern their husbands. Their style, when they 
write to their friends (not for the booksellers) is 
better than that of most authors. — Uneducated 
people have most exuberance of invention, and 






ON THE IGNORANCE OF THE LEARNED. 177 

the greatest freedom from prejudice. Shake- 
spear's was evidently an uneducated mind, both 
in the freshness of his imagination, and in the 
variety of his views ; as Milton's was scholastic, 
in the texture both of his thoughts and feelings. 
Shakespear had not been accustomed to write 
themes at school in favour of virtue or against 
vice* To this we owe the unaffected, but healthy 
tone of his dramatic morality. If we wish to 
know the force of human genius, we should read 
Shakespear. If we wish to see the insignificance 
of human learning, we may study his com- 
mentators. 



x 



ESSAY IX. 
THE INDIAN JUGGLERS. 



ESSAY IX. 
THE INDIAN JUGGLERS. 



Coming forward and seating himself on the 
ground in his white dress and tightened turban, 
the chief of the Indian Jugglers begins with 
tossing up two brass balls, which is what any of 
us could do, and concludes with keeping up 
four at the same time, which is what none of 
us could do to save our lives, nor if we were to 
take our whole lives to do it in. Is it then a 
trifling power we see at work, or is it not some- 
thing next to miraculous? It is the utmost 
stretch of human ingenuity, which nothing but 
the bending the faculties of body and mind to 
it from the tenderest infancy with incessant, 
ever-anxious application up to manhood can 
accomplish or make even a slight approach to. 
Man, thou art a wonderful animal, and thy ways 
past finding out ! Thou canst do strange things, 
but thou turnest them to little account ! — To 
conceive of this effort of extraordinary dexterity 
distracts the imagination and makes admiration 



182 THE INDIAN JUGGLERS. 

breathless. Yet it costs nothing to the per- 
former, any more than if it were a mere me- 
chanical deception with which he had nothing 
to do but to watch and laugh at the astonish- 
ment of the spectators. A single error of a 
hair's-breadth, of the smallest conceivable por- 
tion of time, would be fatal : the precision of 
the movements must be like a mathematical 
truth, their rapidity is like lightning. To catch 
four balls in succession in less than a second of 
time, and deliver them back so as to return with 
seeming consciousness to the hand again, to 
make them revolve round him at certain inter- 
vals, like the planets in their spheres, to make 
them chase one another like sparkles of fire, or 
shoot up like flowers or meteors, to throw them 
behind his back and twine them round his neck 
like ribbons or like serpents, to do what appears 
an impossibility, and to do it with all the ease, 
the grace, the carelessness imaginable, to laugh 
at, to play with the glittering mockeries, to 
follow them with his eye as if he could fascinate 
them with its lambent fire or as if he had only to 
see that they kept time with the music on the 
stage — there is something in all this which he 
who does not admire may be quite sure he never 
really admired any thing in the whole course of 
liis life. It is skill surmounting difficulty, and 



THE INDIAN JUGGLERS. 183 

beauty triumphing over skill. It seems as if 
the difficulty once mastered naturally resolved 
itself into ease and grace, and as if to be over- 
come at all, it must be overcome without an 
effort. The smallest awkwardness or want of 
pliancy or self-possession would stop the whole 
process. It is the work of witchcraft, and yet 
sport for children. Some of the other feats are 
quite as curious and wonderful, such as the ba- 
lancing the artificial tree and shooting a bird 
from each branch through a quill; though none 
of them have the elegance or facility of the 
keeping up of the brass balls. You are in pain 
for the result and glad when the experiment is 
over ; they are not accompanied with the same 
unmixed, unchecked delight as the former; and 
I would not give much to be merely astonished 
without being pleased at the same time. As to 
the swallowing of the sword, the police ought to 
interfere to prevent it. When I saw the Indian 
Juggler do the same things before, his feet were 
bare, and he had large rings on the toes, which 
kept turning round all the time of the per- 
formance, as if they moved of themselves.-— 
The hearing a speech in Parliament, drawled or 
stammered out by the Honourable Member or 
the Noble Lord, the ringing the changes on 
their common-places, which any one could re- 



184 THE INDIAN JUGGLERS. 

peat after them as well as they, stirs me not a 
jot, shakes not my good opinion of myself: but 
the seeing the Indian Jugglers does. It makes 
me ashamed of myself. I ask what there is 
that I can do as well as this ? Nothing. What 
have I been doing all my life ? Have I been idle, 
or have I nothing to shew for all my labour and 
pains? Or have I passed my time in pouring 
words like water into empty sieves, rolling a 
stone up a hill and then down again, trying to 
prove an argument in the teeth of facts, and 
looking for causes in the dark, and not finding 
them? Is there no one thing in which I can 
challenge competition, that I can bring as an 
instance of exact perfection, in which others 
cannot find a flaw ? The utmost I can pretend 
to is to write a description of what this fellow 
can do. I can write a book : so can many 
others who have not even learned to spell. What 
abortions are these Essays ! What errors, what 
ill-pieced transitions, what crooked reasons, 
what lame conclusions ! How little is made out, 
and that little how ill ! Yet they are the best I 
can do. I endeavour to recollect all I have ever 
observed or thought upon a subject, and to ex- 
press it as nearly as I can. Instead of writing 
on four subjects at a time, it is as much as I can 
manage to keep the thread of one discourse 



THE INDIAN JUGGLERS. 185 

clear and unentangled. I have also time on my 
hands to correct my opinions, and polish my 
periods : but the one I cannot, and the other I 
will not do. I am fond of arguing : yet with 
a good deal of pains and practice it is often as 
much as I can do to beat my man ; though he 
may be a very indifferent hand. A common 
fencer would disarm his adversary in the twink- 
ling of an eye, unless he were a professor like 
himself. A stroke of wit will sometimes pro- 
duce this effect, but there is no such power or 
superiority in sense or reasoning. There is no 
complete mastery of execution to be shewn 
there : and you hardly know the professor from 
the impudent pretender or the mere clown 51 '. 
I have always had this feeling of the inefficacy 

* The celebrated Peter Pindar (Dr. Wolcot) first dis- 
covered and brought out the talents of the late Mr. Opie, the 
painter. He was a poor Cornish boy, and was out at work in 
the fields, when the poet went in search of him. " Well, my 
lad, can you go and bring me your very best picture ?" The 
other flew like lightning, and soon came back with what he 
considered as his master-piece. The stranger looked at it, 
and the young artist, after waiting for some time without his 
giving any opinion, at length exclaimed eagerly, " Well, 
what do you think of it?" — " Think of it?" said Wolcot, 
" why, I think you ought to be ashamed of it — that you who 
might do so well, do no better !" The same answer would 
have applied to this artist's latest performances, that had 
been suggested by one of his earliest efforts. 



186 



THE INDIAN JUGGLERS, 



and slow progress of intellectual compared to 
mechanical excellence, and it has always made 
me somewhat dissatisfied. It is a great many 
years since I saw Richer, the famous rope- 
dancer, perform at Sadler's Wells. He was 
matchless in his art, and added to his extra- 
ordinary skill exquisite ease, and unaffected, 
natural grace. I was at that time employed 
in copying a half-length picture of Sir Joshua 
Reynolds's ; and it put me out of conceit with 
it. How ill this part was made out in the 
drawing ! How heavy, how slovenly this other 
was painted ! I could not help saying to myself, 
" If the rope-dancer had performed his task in 
this manner, leaving so many gaps and botches 
in his work, he would have broke his neck long 
ago; I should never have seen that vigorous 
elasticity of nerve and precision of movement !" 
— Is it then so easy an undertaking (compa- 
ratively) to dance on a tight-rope ? Let any one, 
who thinks so, get up and try. There is the 
thing. It is that which at first we cannot do at 
all, which in the end is done to such perfection. 
To account for this in some degree, I might 
observe that mechanical dexterity is confined to 
doing some one particular thing, which you can 
repeat as often as you please, in which you know 
whether you succeed or fail, and where the 



THE INDIAN JUGGLERS. 187 

point of perfection consists in succeeding in a 

given undertaking. — In mechanical efforts, you 

improve by perpetual practice, and you do so^ 

infallibly, because the object to be attained is % 

not a matter of taste or fancy or opinion, but of 

actual experiment, in which you must either do 

the thing or not do it. If a man is put to aim 

at a mark with a bow and arrow, he must hit it 

or miss it, that's certain. He cannot deceive 

himself, and go on shooting wide or falling short, 

and still fancy that he is making progress. The 

distinction between right and wrong, between 

true and false, is here palpable; and he must 

either correct his aim or persevere in his error 

with his eyes open, for which there is neither 

excuse nor temptation. If a man is learning to 

dance on a rope, if he does not mind what he is 

about, he will break his neck. After that, it 

will be in vain for him to argue that he did not 

make a false step. His situation is not like that 

of Goldsmith's pedagogue. — 

" In argument they own'd his wondrous skill, 
And e'en though vanquish'd, he could argue still." 

Danger is a good teacher, and makes apt 
scholars. So are disgrace, defeat, exposure to 
immediate scorn and laughter. There is no 
opportunity in such cases for self-delusion, no 



188 THE INDIAN JUGGLERS. 

idling time away, no being off your guard (or 
you must take the consequences)— neither is 
there any room for humour or caprice or pre- 
judice. If the Indian Juggler were to play 
tricks in throwing up the three case-knives, 
which keep their positions like the leaves of a 
crocus in the air, he would cut his fingers. I 
can make a very bad antithesis without cutting 
my fingers. The tact of style is more ambi- 
guous than that of double-edged instruments. If 
the Juggler were told that by flinging himself 
under the wheels of the Jaggernaut, when the 
idol issues forth on a gaudy day, he would 
immediately be transported into Paradise, he 
might believe it, and nobody could disprove it. 
So the Brahmins may say what they please on 
that subject, may build up dogmas and mys- 
teries without end, and not be detected: but 
their ingenious countryman cannot persuade 
the frequenters of the Olympic Theatre that he 
performs a number of astonishing feats without 
actually giving proofs of what he says. — There 
is then in this sort of manual dexterity, first a 
gradual aptitude acquired to a given exertion of 
muscular power, from constant repetition, and 
in the next place, an exact knowledge how 
much is still wanting and necessary to be sup- 
plied. The obvious test is to increase the effort 



THE INDIAN JUGGLERS. 189 

or nicety of the operation, and still to find it 
come true. The muscles ply instinctively to 
the dictates of habit. Certain movements and 
impressions of the hand and eye, having been 
repeated together an infinite number of times, 
are unconsciously but unavoidably cemented 
into closer and closer union ; the limbs require 
little more than to be put in motion for them 
to follow a regular track with ease and cer- 
tainty ; so that the mere intention of the will 
acts mathematically like touching the spring of 
a machine, and you come with Locksley in 
Ivanhoe, in shooting at a mark, " to allow for 
the wind." 

Farther, what is meant by perfection in me- 
chanical exercises is the performing certain 
feats to a uniform nicety, that is, in fact, under- 
taking no more than you can perform. You 
task yourself, the limit you fix is optional, and no 
more than human industry and skill can attain to: 
but you have no abstract, independent standard 
of difficulty or excellence (other than the ex- 
tent of your own powers). Thus he who can 
keep up four brass balls does this to perfection ; 
but he cannot keep up five at the same instant, 
and would fail every time he attempted it. 
That is, the mechanical performer undertakes 



190 THE INDIAN JUGGLERS. 

to emulate himself, not to equal another*. But 
the artist undertakes to imitate another, or to 
do what nature has done, and this it appears is 
more difficult, viz, to copy what she has set 
before us in the face of nature or " human face 
divine," entire and without a blemish, than -to 
keep up four brass balls at the same instant, for 
the one is done by the power of human skill 
and industry, and the other never was nor 
will be. Upon the whole, therefore, I have 
more respect for Reynolds, than I have for 
Richer; for, happen how it will, there have 
been more people in the world who could dance 
on a rope like the one than who could paint 
like Sir Joshua. The latter was but a bungler 
in his profession to the other, it is true ; but 
then he had a harder task-master to obey, 
whose will was more wayward and obscure, and 
whose instructions it was more difficult to 
practise. You can put a child apprentice to a 
tumbler or rope-dancer with a comfortable pro- 
spect of success, if they are but sound of wind 
and limb : but you cannot do the same thing 
in painting. The odds are a million to one. 

* If two persons play against each other at any game, 
one of them necessarily fails. 



THE INDIAN JUGGLERS. 191 

You may make indeed as many H s and 

H s, as you put into that sort of machine, 

but not one Reynolds amongst them all, with 
his grace, his grandeur, his blandness of gusto> 
" in tones and gestures hit," unless you could 
make the man over again. To snatch this 
grace beyond the reach of art is then the 
height of art — where fine art begins, and where 
mechanical skill ends. The soft suffusion of 
the soul, the speechless breathing eloquence, 
the looks " commercing with the skies," the 
ever-shifting forms of an eternal principle, that 
which is seen but for a moment, but dwells in 
the heart always, and is only seized as it passes 
by strong and secret sympathy, must be taught 
by nature and genius, not by rules or study. 
It is suggested by feeling, not by laborious 
microscopic inspection : in seeking for it with- 
out, we lose the harmonious clue to it within : 
and in aiming to grasp the substance, we let 
the very spirit of art evaporate. In a word, 
the objects of fine art are not the objects of 
sight but as these last are the objects of taste 
and imagination, that is, as they appeal to the 
sense of beauty, of pleasure, and of power in 
the human breast, and are explained by that 
finer sense, and revealed in their inner structure 
to the eye in return. Nature is also a language. 



192 THE INDIAN JUGGLERS, 

Objects, like words, have a meaning; and the 
true artist is the interpreter of this language, 
which he can only do by knowing its applica- 
tion to a thousand other objects in a thousand 
other situations. Thus the eye is too blind a 
guide of itself to distinguish between the warm or 
cold tone of a deep blue sky, but another sense 
acts as a monitor to it, and does not err. The 
colour of the leaves in autumn would be nothing 
without the feeling that accompanies it ; but it 
is that feeling that stamps them on the canvas, 
faded, seared, blighted, shrinking from the 
winter's flaw, and makes the sight, as true as 
touch — 

" And visions, as poetic eyes avow, 

Cling to each leaf and hang on every bough." 

The more ethereal, evanescent, more refined and 
sublime part of art is the seeing nature through 
the medium of sentiment and passion, as each 
object is a symbol of the affections and a link 
in the chain of our endless being. But the un- 
ravelling this mysterious web of thought and 
feeling is alone in the Muse's gift, namely, in 
the power of that trembling sensibility which is 
awake to every change and every modification 
of its ever- varying impressions, that 

" Thrills in each nerve, and lives along the line." 



THE INDIAN JUGGLERS. 193 

This power is indifferently called genius, 
imagination, feeling, taste ; but the manner in 
which it acts upon the mind can neither be 
defined by abstract rules, as is the case in 
science, nor verified by continual unvarying 
experiments, as is the case in mechanical per- 
formances. The mechanical excellence of the 
Dutch painters in colouring and handling is 
that which comes the nearest in fine art to the 
perfection of certain manual exhibitions of skill. 
The truth of the effect and the facility w^ith 
which it is produced are equally admirable. 
Up to a certain point, every thing is faultless. 
The hand and eye have done their part. There 
is only a want of taste and genius. It is after 
we enter upon that enchanted ground that the 
human mind begins to droop and flag as in a 
strange road, or in a thick mist, benighted and 
making little way with many attempts and many 
failures, and that the best of us only escape with 
half a triumph. The undefined and the imagi- 
nary are the regions that we must pass like 
Satan, difficult and doubtful, " half flying, half 
on foot." The object in sense is a positive thing, 
and execution comes with practice. 

Cleverness is a certain knack or aptitude at 
doing certain things, which depend more on a 
particular adroitness and off-hand readiness than 

o 



194 THE INDIAN JUGGLERS. 

on force or perseverance, such as making puns, 
making epigrams, making extempore verse's, 
mimicking the company, mimicking a style, &c. 
Cleverness is either liveliness and smartness, 
or something answering to sleight of hand, like 
letting a glass fall sideways off a table, or else a 
trick, like knowing the secret spring of a watch. 
Accomplishments are certain external graces, 
which are to be learnt from others, and which 
are easily displayed to the admiration of the 
beholder, viz. dancing, riding, fencing, music, 
and so on. These ornamental acquirements 
are only proper to those who are at ease in 
mind and fortune. I know an individual who 
if he had been born to an estate of five thou- 
sand a year, would have been the most accom- 
plished gentleman of the age. He would have 
been the delight and envy of the circle in 
which he moved — would have graced by his 
manners the liberality flowing from the open- 
ness of his heart, would have laughed with the 
women, have argued with the men, have said 
good things and written agreeable ones, have 
taken a hand at piquet or the lead at the harp- 
sichord, and have set and sung his own verses 
— nugco canorco — with tenderness and spirit ; a 
Rochester without the vice, a modern Surrey ! 
As it is, all these capabilities of excellence 



THE INDIAN JUGGLERS. 195 

stand in his way. He is too versatile for a pro- 
fessional man, not dull enough for a political 
drudge, too gay to be happy, too thoughtless 
to be rich. He wants the enthusiasm of the 
poet, the severity of the prose-writer, and the 
application of the man of business. — Talent is 
the capacity of doing any thing that depends 
on application and industry, such as writing a 
criticism, making a speech, studying the law. 
Talent differs from genius, as voluntary differs 
from involuntary power. Ingenuity is genius in 
trifles, greatness is genius in undertakings of 
much pith and moment. A clever or ingenious 
man is one who can do any thing well, whether 
it is worth doing or not : a great man is one who 
can do that which when done is of the highest 
importance. Themistocles said he could not 
play on the flute, but that he could make of a 
small city a great one. This gives one a pretty 
good idea of the distinction in question. 

Greatness is great power, producing great 
effects. It is not enough that a man has great 
power in himself, he must shew it to all the 
world in a way that cannot be hid or gainsaid. 
He must fill up a certain idea in the public 
mind. I have no other notion of greatness than 
this two-fold definition, great results springing 
from great inherent energy. The great in 

o 2 



196 THE INDIAN JUGGLERS. 

visible objects has relation to that which ex- 
tends over space : the great in mental ones has 
to do with space and time. No man is truly 
great, who is great only in his life -time. The 
test of greatness is the page of history. Nothing 
can be said to be great that has a distinct limit, 
or that borders on something evidently greater 
than itself. Besides, what is short-lived and 
pampered into mere notoriety, is of a gross and 
vulgar quality in itself. A Lord Mayor is 
hardly a great man. A city orator or patriot 
of the day only shew, by reaching the height 
of their wishes, the distance they are at from 
any true ambition. Popularity is neither fame 
nor greatness. A king (as such) is not a great 
man. He has great power, but it is not his 
own. He merely wields the lever of the state, 
which a child, an idiot, or a madman can do. 
It is the office, not the man we gaze at. Any 
one else in the same situation would be just as 
much an object of abject curiosity. We laugh 
at the country girl who having seen a king ex- 
pressed her disappointment by saying, " Why, 
he is only a man !" Yet, knowing this, we run 
to see a king as if lie was something more than 
a man. — To display the greatest powers, unless 
they are applied to great purposes, makes no- 
thing for the character of greatness. To throw 



THE INDIAN JUGGLERS. 197 

a barley-corn through the eye of a needle, to 
multiply nine figures by nine in the memory, 
argues infinite dexterity of body and capacity 
of mind, but nothing comes of either. There 
is a surprising power at work, but the effects 
are not proportionate, or such as take hold of 
the imagination. To impress the idea of power 
on others, they must be made in some way to feel 
it. It must be communicated to their under- 
standings in the shape of an increase of know- 
ledge, or it must subdue and overawe them by 
subjecting their wills. Admiration to be solid 
and lasting must be founded on proofs from 
which we have no means of escaping ; it is 
neither a slight nor a voluntary gift. A mathe- 
matician who solves a profound problem, a 
poet who creates an image of beauty in the 
mind that was not there before, imparts know- 
ledge and power to others, in which his great- 
ness and his fame consists, and on which it 
reposes. Jedediah Buxton will be forgotten ; 
but Napier's bones will live. Lawgivers, philo- 
sophers, founders of religion, conquerors and 
heroes, inventors and great geniuses in arts 
and sciences, are great men, for they are great 
public benefactors, or formidable scourges to 
mankind. Among ourselves, Shakespear, New- 
ton, Bacon, Milton, Cromwell, were great men, 



198 THE INDIAN JUGGLERS. 

for they shewed great power by acts and 
thoughts, which have not yet been consigned 
to oblivion. They must needs be men of lofty 
stature, whose shadows lengthen out to remote 
posterity. A great farce-writer may be a great 
man ; for Moliere was but a great farce- writer. 
In my mind, the author of Don Quixote was a 
great man. So have there been many others. 
A great chess-player is not a great man, for he 
leaves the world as he found it. No act ter- 
minating in itself constitutes greatness. This will 
apply to all displays of power or trials of skill, 
which are confined to the momentary, individual 
effort, and construct no permanent image or 
trophy of themselves without them. Is not an 
actor then a great man, because " he dies and 
leaves the world no copy?" I must make an ex- 
ception for Mrs. Siddons, or else give up my de- 
finition of greatness for her sake. A man at the 
top of his profession is not therefore a great man. 
He is great in his way, but that is all, unless he 
shews the marks of a great moving intellect, so 
that we trace the master-mind, and can sym- 
pathise with the springs that urge him on. 
The rest is but a craft or mystery. John Hunter 
was a great man — that any one might see with- 
out the smallest skill in surgery. His style and 
manner shewed the man. He would set about 



THE INDIAN JUGGLERS. 1Q9 

cutting up the carcase of a whale with the same 
greatness of gusto that Michael Angelo would 
have hewn a block of marble. Lord Nelson 
was a great naval commander ; but for myself, 
I have not much opinion of a sea-faring life. 
Sir Humphry Davy is a great chemist, but I 
am not sure that he is a great man. I am not 
a bit the wiser for any of his discoveries, nor I 
never met with any one that was. But it is in 
the nature of greatness to propagate an idea 
of itself, as wave impels wave, circle without 
circle. It is a contradiction in terms for a cox- 
comb to be a great man. A really great man 
has always an idea of something greater than 
himself. I have observed that certain sectaries 
and polemical writers have no higher com- 
pliment to pay their most shining lights than 
to say that " Such a one was a considerable 
man in his day." Some new elucidation of a 
text sets aside the authority of the old inter- 
pretation, and a " great scholar's memory out- 
lives him half a century," at the utmost. A 
rich man is not a great man, except to his de- 
pendants and his steward. A lord is a great 
man in the idea we have of his ancestry, and 
probably of himself, if we know nothing of him 
but his title. I have heard a story of two 
bishops, one of whom said (speaking of Si. 



^00 THE INDIAN JUGGLERS. 

Peter's at Rome) that when he first entered 
it, he was rather awe-struck, but that as he 
walked up it, his mind seemed to swell and 
dilate with it, and at last to fill the whole build- 
ing — the other said that as he saw more of it, 
he appeared to himself to grow less and less 
every step he took, and in the end to dwindle 
into nothing. This was in some respects a 
striking picture of a great and little mind — for 
greatness sympathises with greatness, and little- 
ness shrinks into itself. The one might have 
become a Wolsey ; the other was only fit to 
become a Mendicant Friar — or there might have 
been court-reasons for making him a bishop. 
The French have to me a character of littleness 
in all about them ; but they have produced 
three great men that belong to every country, 
Moliere, Rabelais, and Montaigne. 

To return from this digression, and conclude 
the Essay. A singular instance of manual 
dexterity was shewn in the person of the late 
John Cavanagh, whom I have several times seen. 
His death was celebrated at the time in an article 
in the Examiner newspaper, (Feb. 7> 1819) writ- 
ten apparently between jest and earnest : but as 
it is pat to our purpose, and falls in with my own 
way of considering such subjects, I shall here 
take leave to quote it. 



THE INDIAN JUGGLERS. 201 

" Died at his house in Burbage-street, St. 
Giles's, John Cavanagh, the famous hand fives- 
player. When a person dies, who does any one 
thing better than any one else in the world, 
which so many others are trying to do well, it 
leaves a gap in society. It is not likely that any 
one will now see the game of fives played in its 
perfection for many years to come — for Cavanagh 
is dead, and has not left his peer behind him. 
It may be said that there are things of more 
importance than striking a ball against a wall — 
there are things indeed that make more noise 
and do as little good, such as making war and 
peace, making speeches and answering them, 
making verses and blotting them ; making 
money and throwing it away. But the game 
of fives is what no one despises who has ever 
played at it. It is the finest exercise for the 
body, and the best relaxation for the mind. 
The Roman poet said that 'Care mounted 
behind the horseman and stuck to his skirts.' 
But this remark would not have applied to the 
fives-player. He who takes to playing at fives is 
twice young. He feels neither the past nor 
future ' in the instant. 5 Debts, taxes, ' do- 
mestic treason, foreign levy, nothing can touch 
him further.' He has no other wish, no othei 
thought, from the moment the game begins, 



l 20 c 2 THE INDIAN JUGGLERS. 

but that of striking the ball, of placing it, of 
making it! This Cavanagh was sure to do. 
Whenever he touched the ball, there was an 
end of the chase. His eye was certain, his hand 
fatal, his presence of mind complete. He could 
do what he pleased, and he always knew exactly 
what to do. He saw the whole game, and played 
it ; took instant advantage of his adversary's 
weakness, and recovered balls, as if by a miracle 
and from sudden thought, that every one gave 
for lost. He had equal power and skill, quick- 
ness, and judgment. He could either outwit 
his antagonist by finesse, or beat him by main 
strength. Sometimes, when he seemed pre- 
paring to send the ball with the full swing of his 
arm, he would by a slight turn of his wrist drop 
it within an inch of the line. In general, the 
ball came from his hand, as if from a racket, in 
a straight horizontal line ; so that it was in vain 
to attempt to overtake or stop it. As it was 
said of a great orator that he never was at a 
loss for a word, and for the properest word, so 
Cavanagh always could tell the degree of force 
necessary to be given to a ball, and the precise 
direction in which it should be sent. He did 
his work with the greatest ease ; never took 
more pains than was necessary ; and while others 
were fagging themselves to death, was as cool 



THE INDIAN JUGGLERS. 203 

and collected as if he had just entered the court. 
His style of play was as remarkable as his power 
of execution. He had no affectation, no trifling. 
He did not throw away the game to show off an 
attitude, or try an experiment. He was a fine, 
sensible, manly player, who did what he could, 
but that was more than any one else could even 
affect to do. His blows were not undecided 
and ineffectual — lumbering like Mr. Words- 
worth's epic poetry, nor wavering like Mr. Cole- 
ridge's lyric prose, nor short of the mark like 
Mr. Brougham's speeches, nor wide of it like 
Mr. Canning's wit, nor foul like the Quarterly, 
not let balls like the Edinburgh Review. Cobbett 
and Junius together would have made a Ca- 
vanagh. He was the best up-hill player in the 
world ; even when his adversary was fourteen, 
he would play on the same or better, and as he 
never flung away the game through carelessness 
and conceit, he never gave it up through lazi- 
ness or want of heart. The only peculiarity of 
his play was that he never volleyed, but let the 
balls hop ; but if they rose an inch from the 
ground, he never missed having them. There 
was not only nobody equal, but nobody second 
to him. It is supposed that he could give any 
other player half the game, or beat them with 
his left hand. His service was tremendous. He 



204 THE INDIAN JUGGLERS. 

once played Woodward and Meredith together' 
(two of the best players in England) in the 
Fives-court, St. Martin's-street, and made seven 
and twenty aces following by services alone — a 
thing unheard of. He another time played 
Peru, who was considered a first-rate fives- 
player, a match of the best out of five games, 
and in the three first games, which of course 
decided the match, Peru got only, one ace. Ca- 
vanagh was an Irishman by birth, and a house- 
painter by profession. He had once laid aside 
his working- dress, and walked up, in his smartest 
clothes, to the Rosemary Branch to have an 
afternoon's pleasure. A person accosted him, 
and asked him if he would have a game. So 
they agreed to play for half a crown a game, 
and a bottle of cider. The first game began — 
it was seven, eight, ten, thirteen, fourteen, all. 
Cavanagh won it. The next was the same. 
They played on, and each game was hardly con- 
tested. ' There, 5 said the unconscious fives- 
player, • there was a stroke that Cavanagh could 
not take : I never played better in my life, and 
yet I can't win a game. I don't know how it 
is.' However, they played on, Cavanagh win- 
ning every game, and the by-standers drinking 
the c'ider and laughing all the time. In the 
twelfth game, when Cavanagh was only four, 



THE INDIAN JUGGLERS. 205 

and the stranger thirteen, a person came in, 
and said, ' What ! are you here, Cavanagh ?' 
The words »were no sooner pronounced than 
the astonished player let the ball drop from his 
hand, and saying, ■ What ! have I been breaking 
my heart all this time to beat Cavanagh ?' re- 
fused to make another effort. ' And yet, I give 
you my word/ said Cavanagh, telling the story 
with some triumph, ' I played all the while with 
my clenched fist.' — He used frequently to play 
matches at Copenhagen-house for wagers and 
dinners. The wall against which they play is 
the same that supports the kitchen-chimney, 
and when the wall resounded louder than usual, 
the cooks exclaimed, ' Those are the Irishman's 
balls,' and the joints trembled on the spit ! — 
Goldsmith consoled himself that there were 
places where he too was admired : and Cava- 
nagh was the admiration of all the fives-courts, 
where he ever played. Mr. Powell, when he 
played matches in the Court in St. Martin's- 
street, used to fill his gallery at half-a-crown a 
head, with amateurs and admirers of talent in- 
whatever department it is shown. He could 
not have shown himself in any ground in Eng- 
land, but he would have been immediately sur- 
rounded with inquisitive gazers, trying to find 



206 THE INDIAN JUGGLERS. 

out in what part of his frame his unrivalled skill 
lay, as politicians wonder to see the balance of 
Europe suspended in Lord Castlereagh's face, 
and admire the trophies of the British Navy 
lurking under Mr. Croker's hanging brow. Now 
Cavanagh was as good-looking a man as the 
Noble Lord, and much better looking than the 
Right Hon. Secretary. He had a clear, open 
countenance, and did not look sideways or 
down, like Mr. Murray the bookseller. He was 
a young' fellow of sense, humour, and courage. 
He once had a quarrel with a waterman at 
Hungerford-stairs, and they say, served him out 
in great style. In a word, there are hundreds 
at this day, who cannot mention his name with- 
out admiration, as the best fives-player that per- 
haps ever lived (the greatest excellence of which 
they have any notion) — and the noisy shout of 
the ring happily stood him in stead of the un- 
heard voice of posterity ! — The only person who 
seems to have excelled as much in another way 
as Cavanagh did in his, was the late John Davies, 
the racket-player. It was remarked of him that 
he did not seem to follow the ball, but the ball 
seemed to follow him. Give him a foot of wall, 
and he was sure to make the ball. The four 
best racket-players of that day were Jack Spines, 



THE INDIAN JUGGLERS. 207 

Jem. Harding, Armitage, and Church. Davies 
could give any one of these two hands a time, 
that is, half the game, and each of these, at their 
best, could give the best player now in London 
the same odds. Such are the gradations in all 
exertions of human skill and art. He once 
played four capital players together, and beat 
them. He was also a first-rate tennis-player, 
and an excellent fives-player. In the Fleet or 
King's Bench, he would have stood against 
Powell, who was reckoned the best open-ground 
player of his time. This last-mentioned player 
is at present the keeper of the Fives-court, and 
we might recommend to him for a motto over 
his door — ' Who enters here, forgets himself, 
his country, and his friends.' And the best of 
it is, that by the calculation of the odds, none 
of the three are worth remembering ! — Cava- 
nagh died from the bursting of a blood-vessel, 
which prevented him from playing for the last 
two or three years. This, he was often heard 
to say, he thought hard upon him. He was fast 
recovering, however, when he was suddenly 
carried off, to the regret of all who knew him. 
As Mr. Peel made it a qualification of the pre- 
sent Speaker, Mr. Manners Sutton, that he was 
an excellent moral character, so Jack Cavanagh 
was a zealous Catholic, and could not be per- 



208 THE INDIAN JUGGLERS. 

suaded to eat meat on a Friday, the day on 
which he died. We have paid this willing tri- 
bute to his memory. 

" Let no rude hand deface it, 
And his forlorn ' Hie Jacet.' " 



ESSAY X. 
ON LIVING TO ONE'S-SELF. 



ESSAY X. 
ON LIVING TO ONES-SELF*. 



" Remote,, unfriended, melancholy _, slow, 
Or by the lazy Scheldt or wandering Po." 

I never was in a better place or humour than 
I am at present for writing on this subject. I 
have a partridge getting ready for my supper, 
my fire is blazing on the hearth, the air is mild 
for the season of the year, I have had but a 
slight fit of indigestion to-day (the only thing 
that makes me abhor myself), I have three 
hours good before me, and therefore I will at- 
tempt it. It is as well to do it at once as to 
have it to do for a week to come. 

If the writing on this subject is no easy task, 
the thing itself is a harder one. It asks a trouble- 
some effort to ensure the admiration of others : 
it is a still greater one to be satisfied with one's 
own thoughts. As I look from the window at 
the wide bare heath before me, and through the 

* Written at Wmterslow Hut, January 18th— 19th. 

P 2 



212 ON LIVING TO ONE'S-SELF. 

misty moon-light air see the woods that wave 
over the top of Winterslow, 

" While Heav'n's chancel-vault is blind with sleet," 

my mind takes its flight through too long a 
series of years, supported only by the patience 
of thought and secret yearnings after truth and 
good, for me to be at a loss to understand the 
feeling I intend to write about ; but I do not 
know that this will enable me to convey it more 
agreeably to the reader. 

Lady G. in a letter to Miss Harriet Byron, 
assures her that " her brother Sir Charles lived 
to himself:" and Lady L. soon after (for Rich- 
ardson was never tired of a good thing) repeats 
the same observation ; to which Miss Byron 
frequently returns in her answers to both sisters 
— " For you know Sir Charles lives to himself" 
till at length it passes into a proverb among the 
fair correspondents. This is not, however, an 
example of what I understand by living to one's- 
self, for Sir Charles Grandison was indeed always 
thinking of himself; but by this phrase I mean 
never thinking at all about one's-self, any more 
than if there was no such person in existence. 
The character I speak of is as little of an egotist 
as possible : Richardson's great favourite was as 
much of one as possible. Some satirical critic 



213 

has represented him in Elysium " bowing over 
the faded hand of Lady Grandison" (Miss Byron 
that was) — he ought to have been represented 
bowing over his own hand, for he never admired 
any one but himself, and was the God of his 
own idolatry. — Neither do I call it living to 
one's-self to retire into a desert (like the saints 
and martyrs of old) to be devoured by wild 
beasts, nor to descend into a cave to be con- 
sidered as a hermit, nor to get to the top of a 
pillar or rock to do fanatic penance and be seen 
of all men. What I mean by living to one's-self 
is living in the world, as in it, not of it : it is 
as if no one knew there was such a person, and 
you wished no one to know it : it is to be a 
silent spectator of the mighty scene of things, 
not an object of attention or curiosity in it ; to 
take a thoughtful, anxious interest in what is 
passing in the world, but not to feel the slightest 
inclination to make or meddle with it. It i> 
such a life as a pure spirit might be supposed to 
lead, and such an interest as it might take in 
the affairs of men, calm, contemplative, passive, 
distant, touched with pity for their sorrows, 
smiling at their follies without bitterness, sharing 
their affections, but not troubled by their passions, 
not seeking their notice, nor once dreamt of by 
them. He who lives wisely to himself ami to 



214 ON LIVING TO ONE'S-SELF. 

his own heart, looks at the busy world through 
the loop-holes of retreat, and does not want to 
mingle in the fray. " He hears the tumult, and 
is still." He is not able to mend it, nor willing 
to mar it. He sees enough in the universe to 
interest him without putting himself forward to 
try what he can do to fix the eyes of the uni- 
verse upon .him. Vain the attempt ! He reads 
the clouds, he looks at the stars, he watches 
the return of the seasons, the falling leaves of 
autumn, the perfumed breath of spring, starts 
with delight at the note of a thrush in a copse 
near him, sits by the fire, listens to the moaning 
of the wind, pores upon a book, or discourses 
the freezing hours away, or melts down hours 
to minutes in pleasing thought. All this while 
he is taken up with other things, forgetting 
himself. He relishes an author's style, without 
thinking of turning author. He is fond of look- 
ing at a print from an old picture in the room, 
without teasing himself to copy it. He does 
not fret himself to death with trying to be what 
he is not, or to do what he cannot. He hardly 
knows what he is capable of, and is not in the 
least concerned whether he shall ever make a 
figure in the world. He feels the truth of the 
lines — 



ON LIVING TO ONE's-SELF. C 215 

" The man whose eye is ever on himself, 
Doth look on one,, the least of nature's works ; 
One who might move the wise man to that scorn 
Which wisdom holds unlawful ever" — 

he looks out of himself at the wide extended 
prospect of nature, and takes an interest beyond 
his narrow pretensions in general humanity. 
He is free as air, and independent as the wind. 
Woe be to him when he first begins to think 
what others say of him. While a man is con- 
tented with himself and his own resources, all is 
well. When he undertakes to play a part on 
the stage, and to persuade the world to think 
more about him than they do about themselves, 
he is got into a track where he will find nothing 
but briars and thorns, vexation and disappoint- 
ment. I can speak a little to this point. For 
many years of my life I did nothing but think. 
I had nothing else to do but solve some knotty 
point, or dip in some abstruse author, or look at 
the sky, or wander by the pebbled sea-side — 

" To see the children sporting on the shore, 
And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore." 

I cared for nothing, I wanted nothing. I took 
my time to consider whatever occurred to me, 
and was in no hurry to give a sophistical answer 
to a question— there was no printer's devil 



216 



waiting for me. I used to write a page or two 
perhaps in half a year ; and remember laughing 
heartily at the celebrated experimentalist Nichol- 
son, who told me that in twenty years he had 
written as much as would make three hundred 
octavo volumes. If I was not a great author, I 
could read with ever fresh delight, " never end- 
ing, still beginning/' and had no occasion to 
write a criticism when I had done. If I could 
not paint like Claude, I could admire " the 
witchery of the soft blue sky" as I walked out, 
and was satisfied with the pleasure it gave me. 
If I was dull, it gave me little concern : if I was 
lively, I indulged my spirits. I wished well to 
the world, and believed as favourably of it as I 
could. I was like a stranger in a foreign land, 
at which I looked with wonder, curiosity, and 
delight, without expecting to be an object of 
attention in return. I had no relations to the 
state, no duty to perform, no ties to bind me to 
others : I had neither friend nor mistress, wife 
or child. I lived in a world of contemplation, 
and not of action. 

This sort of dreaming existence is the best. 
He who quits it to go in search of realities, 
generally barters repose for repeated disappoint- 
ments and vain regrets. His time, thoughts, 
and feelings are no longer at his own disposal. 



ON LIVING TO ONE's-SELF. ^IJ 

From that instant he does not survey the objects 
of nature as they are in themselves, but looks 
asquint at them to see whether he cannot make 
them the instruments of his ambition, interest, 
or pleasure ; for a candid, undesigning, undis- 
guised simplicity of character, his views become 
jaundiced, sinister, and double : he takes no 
farther interest in the great changes of the 
world but as he has a paltry share in producing 
them : instead of opening his senses, his under- 
standing, and his heart to the resplendent fabric 
of the universe, he holds a crooked mirror before 
his face, in which he may admire his own person 
and pretensions, and just glance his eye aside to 
see whether others are not admiring him too. 
He no more exists in the impression which 
" the fair variety of things" makes upon him, 
softened and subdued by habitual contempla- 
tion, but in the feverish sense of his own up- 
start self-importance. By aiming to fix, he is 
become the slave of opinion. He is a tool, a 
part of a machine that never stands still, and is 
sick and giddy with the ceaseless motion. He 
has no satisfaction but in the reflection of his 
own image in the public gaze, but in the repe- 
tition of his own name in the public ear. He 
himself is mixed up with, and spoils every thing. 
I wonder Buonaparte was not tired of the N. N.'s 



218 ON LIVING TO ONE'S-SELF. 

stuck all over the Louvre and throughout France. 
Goldsmith (as we all know) when in Holland 
went out into a balcony with some handsome 
Englishwomen, and on their being applauded 
by the spectators, turned round and said pee- 
vishly — " There are places where I also am 
admired." He could not give the craving ap- 
petite of an author's vanity one day's respite. I 
have seen a celebrated talker of our own time 
turn pale and go out of the room when a showy- 
looking girl has come into it, who for a moment 
divided the attention of his hearers. — Infinite 
are the mortifications of the bare attempt to 
emerge from obscurity; numberless the fail- 
ures ; and greater and more galling still the vi- 
cissitudes and tormenting accompaniments of 
success — 

— " Whose top to climb 
Is certain falling, or so slippery, that 
The fear's as bad as falling/' 

" Would to God," exclaimed Oliver Cromwell, 
when lie was at any time thwarted by the Par- 
liament, " that I had remained by my wood- 
side to tend a flock of sheep, rather than have 
been thrust on such a government as this !" 
When Buonaparte got into his carriage to pro- 
ceed on his Russian expedition, carelessly twirl- 
ing his glove, and singing the air — " Malbrook 



219 

to the wars is going" — he did not think of the 
tumble he has got since, the shock of which no 
one could have stood but himself. We see and 
hear chiefly of the favourites of Fortune and the 
Muse, of great generals, of first-rate actors, of 
celebrated poets. These are at the head ; we 
are struck wjth the glittering eminence on which 
they stand, and long to set out on the same 
tempting career : — not thinking how many dis- 
contented half-pay lieutenants are in vain seek- 
ing promotion all their lives, and obliged to put 
up with " the insolence of office, and the spurns 
which patient merit of the unworthy takes ;" 
how many half-starved strolling-players are 
doomed to penury and tattered robes in country- 
places, dreaming to the last of a London engage- 
ment ; how many wretched daubers shiver and 
shake in the ague-fit of alternate hopes and fears, 
waste and pine away in the atrophy of genius, or 
else turn drawing-masters, picture-cleaners, or 
newspaper critics ; how many hapless poets have 
sighed out their souls to the Muse in vain, 
without ever getting their effusions farther 
known than the Poet's-Corner of a country 
newspaper, and looked and looked with grudg- 
ing, wistful eyes at the envious horizon that 
bounded their provincial fame! — Suppose an 
actor, for instance, " after the heart -aches and 



220 

the thousand natural pangs that flesh is heir to," 
does get at the top of his profession, he can 
no longer bear a rival near the throne ; to be 
second or only equal to another, is to be nothing : 
he starts at the prospect of a successor, and re- 
tains the mimic sceptre with a convulsive grasp : 
perhaps as he is about to seize the first place 
which he has long had in his eye, an unsuspected 
competitor steps in before him, and carries off 
the prize, leaving him to commence his irksome 
toil again : he is in a state of alarm at every ap- 
pearance or rumour of the appearance of a new 
actor : "a mouse that takes up its lodging in a 
cat's ear*" has a mansion of peace to him : he 
dreads every hint of an objection, and least of all, 
can forgive praise mingled with censure: to 
doubt is to insult, to discriminate is to degrade : 
he dare hardly look into a criticism unless some 
one has tasted it for him, to see that there is no 
offence in it: if he does not draw crowded houses 
every night, he can neither eat nor sleep ; or if 
all these terrible inflictions are removed, and he 
can " eat his meal in peace," he then becomes 
surfeited with applause and dissatisfied with his 
profession : he wants to be something else, to 
be distinguished as an author, a collector, a 

• Webster's Duchess of Mulfy. 



ON LIVING TO ONE'S-SELF. 221 

classical scholar, a man of sense and informa- 
tion, and weighs every word he utters, and half 
retracts it before he utters it, lest if he were to 
make the smallest slip of the tongue, it should 

get buzzed abroad that Mr. ■ was only 

clever as an actor! If ever there was a man 
who did not derive more pain than pleasure 
from his vanity, that man, says Rousseau, was 
no other than a fool. A country-gentleman 
near Taunton spent his whole life in making 
some hundreds of wretched copies of second-rate 
pictures, which were bought up at his death by 
a neighbouring Baronet, to whom 

" Some demon whisper'd, L f have a taste !" 

A little Wilson in an obscure corner escaped the 
man of tor til, and was carried off by a Bristol 
picture-dealer for three guineas, while the 
muddled copies of the owner of the mansion 
(with the frames) fetched thirty, forty, sixty, a 
hundred ducats a piece. A friend of mine 
found a very fine Canaletti in a state of strange 
disfigurement, with the upper part of the sky 
smeared over and fantastically variegated with 
English clouds; and on inquiring of the person to 
whom it belonged whether something had not 
been done to it, received for answer " that a 
gentleman, a great artist in the neighbourhood, 



C 22Q ON LIVING TO ONE'S-SELF. 

had retouched some parts of it." What infa- 
tuation ! Yet this candidate for the honours of 
the pencil might probably have made a jovial 
fox-hunter or respectable justice of the peace, 
if he could only have stuck to what nature and 
fortune intended him for. Miss — — can by 
no means be persuaded to quit the boards of the 

theatre at , a little country town in the 

West of England. Her salary has been abridged, 
her person ridiculed, her acting laughed at ; 
nothing will serve — she is determined to be an 
actress, and scorns to return to her former busi- 
ness as a milliner. Shall I go on ? An actor in the 
same company was visited by the apothecary of 
the place in an ague-fit, who on asjdng his land- 
lady as to his way of life, was told that the poor 
gentleman was very quiet and gave little trouble, 
that he generally had a plate of mashed potatoes 
for his dinner, and lay in bed most of his time, 
repeating his part. A young couple, every way 
amiable and deserving, were to have been mar- 
ried, and a benefit-play was bespoke by the 
officers of the regiment quartered there, to de- 
fray the expense of a license and of the wed- 
ding-ring, but the profits of the night did not 
amount to the necessary sum, and they have, I 
fear, " virgined it e'er since !" Oh for the pencil 
of Hogarth or Wilkie to give a view of the 



QQ3 

comic strength of the company at , drawn 

up in battle-array in the Clandestine Marriage, 
with a coup-d'ceil of the pit, boxes, and gallery, 
to cure for ever the love of the ideal, and the 
desire to shine and make holiday in the eyes of 
others, instead of retiring within ourselves and 
keeping our wishes and our thoughts at home ! 
— Even in the common affairs of life, in love, 
friendship, and marriage, how little security 
have we when w r e trust our happiness in the 
hands of others ! Most of the friends I have 
seen have turned out the bitterest enemies or 
cold, uncomfortable acquaintance. Old com- 
panions are like meats served up too often that 
lose their relish and their wholesomeness. He 
who looks at beauty to admire, to adore it, who 
reads of its wondrous power in novels, in poems, 
or in plays, is not unwise : but let no man fall 
in love, for from that moment he is " the baby 
of a girl." I like very well to repeat such lines 
as these in the play of Mirandola — 

— " With what a waving air she goes 
Along the corridor. How like a fawn ! 
Yet statelier. Hark ! No sound, however soft, 
Nor gentlest echo telleth when she treads, 
But every motion of her shape doth seem 
Hallowed by silence' ' — 

but however beautiful the description, defend 
me from meeting with the original ! 



224 ON LIVING TO ONE'S-SELF. 

w The fly that sips treacle 
Is lost in the sweets ; 
So he that tastes woman 
Ruin meets." 

The song is Gay's, not mine, and a bitter-sweet 
it is. — How few out of the infinite number of 
those that many and are given in marriage, 
wed with those they would prefer to all the 
world ; nay, how far the greater proportion are 
joined together by mere motives of convenience, 
accident, recommendation of friends, or indeed 
not unfrequently by the very fear of the event, 
by repugnance and a sort of fatal fascination : 
yet the tie is for life, not to be shaken off but 
with disgrace or death : a man no longer lives 
to himself, but is a body (as well as mind) 
chained to another, in spite of himself — 

" Like life and death in disproportion met." 

So Milton (perhaps from his own experience) 
makes Adam exclaim in the vehemence of his 
despair, 

" For either 
He never shall find out fit mate, but such 
As some misfortune brings him or mistake ; 
Or whom he wishes most shall seldom gain 
Through her pervcrsencss, but shall sec her gain'd 
By a far worse ; or if she love, withheld 



ON LIVING TO ONe's-SELF. Q<2o 

By parents ; or his happiest choice too late 
Shall meet, already link'd and wedlock-bound 
To a fell adversary, his hate and shame ; 
Which infinite calamity shall cause 
To human life, and household peace confound." 

If love at first sight were mutual, or to be con- 
ciliated by kind offices ; if the fondest affection 
were not so often repaid and chilled by indif- 
ference and scorn ; if so many lovers both before 
and since the madman in Don Quixote had not 
" worshipped a statue, hunted the wind, cried 
aloud to the desert;" if friendship were lasting; 
if merit were renown, and renown were health, 
riches, and long life ; or if the homage of the 
world were paid to conscious worth and the true 
aspirations after excellence, instead of its gaudy 
signs and outward trappings ; then indeed I 
might be of opinion that it is better to live to 
others than one's-self : but as the case stands, I 
incline to the negative side of the question*. — 

* Shenstone and Gray were two men, one of whom pre- 
tended to live to himself, and the other really did so. Gray 
shrunk from the public gaze (he did not even like his portrait 
to be prefixed to his works) into his own thoughts and indo- 
lent musings ; Shenstone affected privacy that he might be 
sought out by the world ; the one courted retirement in order 
to enjoy leisure and repose, as the other coquetted with it 
merely to be interrupted with the importunity of visitors and 
the flatteries of absent friends. 

Q 



220 



" I have not loved the world, nor the world me ; 

I have not flattered its rank breath, nor bow'd 

To its idolatries a patient knee — 

Nor coin'd my cheek to smiles — nor cried aloud 

In worship of an echo ; in the crowd 

They could not deem me one of such ; I stood 

Among them, but not of them ; in a shroud 

Of thoughts which were not their thoughts, and still could, 

Had I not filed my mind which thus itself subdued. 

I have not loved the world, nor the world me — 

But let us part fair foes ; I do believe, 

Though I have found them not, that there may be 

Words which are things — hopes which will not deceive, 

And virtues which are merciful nor weave 

Snares for the failing : I would also deem 

O'er others' griefs that some sincerely grieve ; 

That two, or one, are almost what they seem — 

That goodness is no name, and happiness no dream." 

Sweet verse embalms the spirit of sour mis- 
anthropy : but woe betide the ignoble prose- 
writer who should thus dare to compare notes 
with the world, or tax it roundly with imposture. 

If I had sufficient provocation to rail at the 
public, as Ben Jonson did at the audience in 
the Prologues to his plays, I think I should do 
it in good set terms, nearly as follows. There 
is not a more mean, stupid, dastardly, pitiful, 
selfish, spiteful, envious, ungrateful animal than 
the Public. It is the greatest of cowards, for 
it is afraid of itself. Prom its unwieldy, over- 



ON LIVING TO ONE's-SELF. 9.QT/ 

grown dimensions, it dreads the least opposition 
to it, and shakes like isinglass at the touch of a 
finger. It starts at its own shadow, like the man 
in the Hartz mountains, and trembles at the men- 
tion of its own name. It has a lion's mouth, the 
heart of a hare, with ears erect and sleepless eyes. 
It stands " listening its fears." It is so in awe of 
its own opinion, that it never dares to form any, 
but catches up the first idle rumour, lest it 
should be behind-hand in its judgment, and 
echoes it till it is deafened with the sound of its 
own voice. The idea of what the public will 
think prevents the public from ever thinking at 
all, and acts as a spell on the exercise of private 
judgment, so that in short the public ear is at 
the mercy of the first impudent pretender who 
chooses to fill it with noisy assertions, or false sur- 
mises, or secret whispers. What is said by one 
is heard by all ; the supposition that a thing is 
known to all the world makes all the world be- 
lieve it, and the hollow repetition of a vague 
report drowns the "still, small voice" of reason. 
We may believe or know that what is said is not 
true : but we know or fancy that others believe 
it — we dare not contradict or are too indolent 
to dispute with them, and therefore give up our 
internal, and as we think, our solitary conviction 
to a sound without substance, without proof, 

Q l 2 



228 

and often without meaning. Nay more, we 
may believe and know not only that a thing is 
false but that others believe and know it to be 
so, that they are quite as much in the secret of 
the imposture as we are, that they see the pup- 
pets at work, the nature of the machinery, and 
yet if any one has the art or power to get the ma- 
nagement of it, he shall keep possession of the 
public ear by virtue of a cant-phrase or nick- 
name ; and by dint of effrontery and perse- 
verance make all the world believe and repeat 
what all the world know to be false. The ear is 
quicker than the judgment. We know that 
certain things are said ; by that circumstance 
alone, we know that they produce a certain 
effect on the imagination of others, and we 
conform to their prejudices by mechanical sym- 
pathy, and for want of sufficient spirit to differ 
with them. So far then is public opinion from 
resting on a broad and solid basis, as the aggre- 
gate of thought and feeling in a community, that 
it is slight and shallow and variable to the last 
degree — the bubble of the moment — so that we 
may safely say the public is the dupe of public 
opinion, not its parent. — The public is pusilla- 
nimous and cowardly, because it is weak. It 
knows itself to be a great dunce, and that it has 
no opinions but upon suggestion. Yet it is un- 



ON LIVING TO ONE's-SELF. 2<£Q 

willing to appear in leading-strings, and would 
have it thought that its decisions are as wise as 
they are weighty. It is hasty in taking up its 
favourites, more hasty in laying them aside, lest 
it should be supposed deficient in sagacity in 
either case. It is generally divided into two 
strong parties, each of which will allow neither 
common sense nor common honesty to the other 
side. It reads the Edinburgh and Quarterly 
Reviews, and believes them both — or if there is 
a doubt, malice turns the scale. Taylor and 
Hessey told me that they had sold nearly two 
editions of the Characters of Shakespear's Plays 
in about three months, but that after the Quar- 
terly Review of them came out, they never sold 
another copy. The public, enlightened as they 
are, must have known the meaning of that at- 
tack as well as those who made it. It was not 
ignorance then but cowardice that led them to 
give up their own opinion. A crew of mis- 
chievous critics at Edinburgh having affixed 
the epithet of the Cockney School to one or two 
writers born in the metropolis, all the people in 
London became afraid of looking into their 
works, lest they too should be convicted of 
cockneyism. Oh brave public ! — This epithet 
proved too much for one of the writers in ques- 
tion, and stuck like a barbed arrow in his heart. 



c 230 ON LIVING TO ONE'S-SELF. 

Poor Keats ! What was sport to the town, was 
death to him. Young, sensitive, delicate, he 
was like 

" A bud bit by an envious worm, 

Ere he could spread his sweet leaves to the air, 

Or dedicate his beauty to the sun"- — 

and unable to endure the miscreant cry and 
idiot laugh, withdrew to sigh his last breath in 
foreign climes. — The public is as envious and 
ungrateful as it is ignorant, stupid, and pigeon- 
livered — ■ 

" A huge-sized monster of ingratitudes." 

It reads, it admires, it extols only because it is 
the fashion, not from any love of the subject or 
the man. It cries you up or runs you down 
out of mere caprice and levity. If you have 
pleased it, it is jealous of its own involuntary 
acknowledgment of merit, and seizes the first 
opportunity, the first shabby pretext, to pick a 
quarrel with you, and be quits once more. Every 
petty caviller is erected into a judge, every tale- 
bearer is implicitly believed. Every little low 
paltry creature that gaped and wondered only 
because others did so, is glad to find you (as he 
thinks) on a level with himself. An author is not 
then, after all, a being of another order. Public 



<281 

admiration is forced, and goes against the grain. 
Public obloquy is cordial and sincere : every 
individual feels his own importance in it. They 
give you up bound hand and foot into the power 
of your accusers. To attempt to defend yourself 
is a high crime and misdemeanour, a contempt 
of court, an extreme piece of impertinence. Or 
if you prove every charge unfounded, they 
never think of retracting their error, or making 
you amends. It would be a compromise of 
their dignity, they consider themselves as the 
party injured, and resent your innocence as an 
imputation on their judgment. The celebrated 
Bub Doddington, when out of favour at court, 
said " he would not justify before his sovereign : 
it was for Majesty to be displeased, and for him 
to believe himself in the wrong !" The public 
are not quite so modest. — People already 
begin to talk of the Scotch Novels as over- 
rated. How then can common authors be sup- 
posed to keep their heads long above water? 
As a general rule, all those who live by the 
public starve, and are made a bye- word and a 
standing jest into the bargain. — Posterity is no 
better (not a bit more enlightened or more 
liberal) except that you are no longer in their 
power, and that the voice of common fame saves 
them the trouble of deciding on your claims. 



232 ON LIVING TO ONE'S-SELF. 

The public now are the posterity of Milton and 
Shakespear, Oar posterity will be the living 
public of a future generation. When a man is 
dead, they put money in his coffin, erect monu- 
ments to his memory, and celebrate the anni- 
versary of his birth-day in set speeches. Would 
they take any notice of him if he were living ? 
No ! — I was complaining of this to a Scotchman 
who had been attending a dinner and a sub- 
scription to raise a monument to Burns. He 
replied he would sooner subscribe twenty pounds 
to his monument than have given it him while 
living; so that if the poet were to come to 
life again, he would treat him just as he was 
treated in fact. This was an honest Scotchman. 
What he said, the rest would do. 

Enough : my soul, turn from them, and let 
me try to regain the obscurity and quiet that I 
love, " far from the madding strife," in some 
sequestered corner of my own, or in some far- 
distant land ! In the latter case, I might carry 
with me as a consolation the passage in Boling- 
broke's Reflections on Exile, in which he de- 
scribes in glowing colours the resources which 
a man may always find within himself, and of 
which the world cannot deprive him. 

" Believe me, the providence of God has 
established such an order in the world, that of 



ON LIVING TO ONE's-SELF. 233 

all which belongs to us, the least valuable parts 
can alone fall under the will of others. What- 
ever is best is safest; lies out of the reach of 
human power ; can neither be given nor taken 
away. Such is this great and beautiful work of 
nature, the world. Such is the mind of man, 
which contemplates and admires the world 
whereof it makes the noblest part. These are 
inseparably ours, and as long as we remain in 
one we shall enjoy the other. Let us march 
therefore intrepidly wherever we are led by the 
course of human accidents. Wherever they 
lead us, on what coast soever we are thrown by 
them, we shall not find ourselves absolutely 
strangers. We shall feel the same revolution of 
seasons, and the same sun and moon * will guide 
the course of our year. The same azure vault, 
bespangled with stars, will be every where 
spread over our heads. There is no part of the 
world from whence we may not admire those 
planets which roll, like ours, in different orbits 
round the same central sun; from whence we 

* " Plut. of Banishment. He compares those who cannot 
live out of their own country, to the simple people who 
fancied the moon of Athens was a finer moon than that of 
Corinth. 

Labenlem ccelo qua ducitis annum. 

Vine. Geonr. 



!234 ON LIVING TO ONE'S-SELF. 

may not discover an object still more stupend- 
ous, that army of fixed stars hung up in the 
immense space of the universe, innumerable 
suns whose beams enlighten and cherish the 
unknown worlds which roll around them : and 
whilst I am ravished by such contemplations as 
these, whilst my soul is thus raised up to heaven, 
it imports me little what ground I tread upon.'* 



ESSAY XI. 
ON THOUGHT AND ACTION. 



ESSAY XL 

ON THOUGHT AND ACTION 



Those persons who are much accustomed to 
abstract contemplation are generally unfitted 
for active pursuits, and vice versa. I myself am 
sufficiently decided and dogmatical in my opi- 
nions, and yet in action I am as imbecil as a 
woman or a child. I cannot set about the 
most indifferent thing without twenty efforts, 
and had rather write one of these Essays than 
have to seal a letter. In trying to throw a hat 
or a book upon a table, I miss it; it just reaches 
the edge and falls back again, and instead of 
doing what I mean to perform, I do what I in- 
tend to avoid. Thought depends on the habitual 
exercise of the speculative faculties ; action on 
the determination of the will. The one assigns 
reasons for things, the other puts causes into 
act. Abraham Tucker relates of a friend of 
his, an old special pleader, that once coming out 
of his chambers in the Temple with him to take 
a walk, he hesitated at the bottom of the stairs 



238 ON THOUGHT AND ACTION. 

which way to go — proposed different directions, 
to Charing-Cross, to St. Paul's, — found some ob- 
jection to them all, and at last turned back for 
want of a casting motive to incline the scale. 
Tucker gives this as an instance of profes- 
sional indecision, or of that temper of mind 
which having been long used to weigh the 
reasons for things with scrupulous exactness, 
could not come to any conclusion at all on the 
spur of the occasion, or without some grave 
distinction to justify its choice. Louvet in his 
Narrative tells us, that when several of the 
Brissotin party were collected at the house of 
Barbaroux (I think it was) ready to effect their 
escape from the power of Robespierre, one of 
them going to the window and finding a shower 
of rain coming on, seriously advised their stop- 
ping till the next morning, for that the emissaries 
of government would not think of coming in 
search of them in such bad weather. Some of 
them deliberated on this wise proposal, and 
were nearly taken. Such is the effeminacy of 
the speculative and philosophical temperament, 
compared with the promptness and vigour of 
the practical ! It is on such unequal terms that 
the refined and romantic speculators on pos- 
sible good and evil contend with their strong, 
nerved, remorseless adversaries, and we see the 



ON THOUGHT AND ACTION. 2S9 

result. Reasoners in general are undecided, 
wavering, and sceptical, or yield at last to the 
weakest motive, as most congenial to their 
feeble habit of soul *-. 

Some men are mere machines. They are 
put in a go-cart of business, and are harnessed 
to a profession — yoked to fortune's wheels. 
They plod on, and succeed. Their affairs con- 
duct them, not they their affairs. All they 
have to do is to let things take their course, 
and not go out of the beaten road. A man may 
carry on the business of farming on the same 
spot and principle that his ancestors have done 
for many generations before him without any 
extraordinary share of capacity: the proof is, it 
is done every day in every county and parish 
in the kingdom. All that is necessary is that 
he should not pretend to be wiser than his 
neighbours. If he has a grain more wit or 
penetration than they, if his vanity gets the 
start of his avarice only half a neck, if he has 

* When Buonaparte left the Chamber of Deputies to go 
and fight his last fatal battle, he advised them not to be de- 
bating the forms of Constitutions when the enemy was at 
their gates. Benjamin Constant thought otherwise. He 
wanted to play a game at cat's- cradle between the Repub- 
licans and Royalists, and lost his match. He did not care, 
so that he hampered a more efficient man than himself. 



240 ON THOUGHT AND ACTION. 

ever thought or read any thing upon the sub- 
ject, it will most probably be the ruin of him. 
He will turn theoretical or experimental farmer, 
and no more need be said. Mr. Cobbett, who 
is a sufficiently shrewd and practical man, with 
an eye also to the main chance, had got some 
notions in his head (from Tull's Husbandry) 
about the method of sowing turnips, to which 
he would have sacrificed not only his estate at 
Botley, but his native county of Hampshire it- 
self, sooner than give up an inch of his argu- 
ment. " Tut! will you baulk a man in the 
career of his humour ?" Therefore, that a man 
may not be ruined by his humours, he should 
be too dull and phlegmatic to have any: he 
must have " no figures nor no fantasies which 
busy thought draws in the brains of men/' 
The fact is, that the ingenuity or judgment of 
no one man is equal to that of the world at 
large, which is the fruit of the experience and 
ability of all mankind. Even where a man is 
right in a particular notion, he will be apt to 
over-rate the importance of his discovery, to 
the detriment of his affairs. Action requires 
co-operation, but in general if you set your 
face against custom, people will set their faces 
against you. They cannot tell whether you are 
right or wrong, but they know that you are guilty 



ON THOUGHT AND ACTION. 241 

of a pragmatical assumption of superiority over 
them, which they do not like. There is no 
doubt that if a person two hundred years ago 
had foreseen and attempted to put in practice 
the most approved and successful methods of 
cultivation now in use, it would have been a 
death-blow to his credit and fortune. So that 
though the experiments and improvements of 
private individuals from time to time gradually 
go to enrich the public stock of information 
and reform the general practice, they are 
mostly the ruin of the person who makes them, 
because he takes a part for the whole, and lays 
more stress upon the single point in which he 
has found others in the wrong than on all the 
rest in which they are substantially and pre- 
scriptively in the right. The great requisite, it 
should appear then, for the prosperous manage- 
ment of ordinary business, is the want of imagi- 
nation, or of any ideas but those of custom and 
interest on the narrowest scale : — and as the 
affairs of the world are necessarily carried on 
by the common run of its inhabitants, it seems 
a wise dispensation of Providence that it should 
be so. If no one could rent a piece of glebe- 
land without a genius for mechanical inven- 
tions, or stand behind a counter without a largo 
benevolence of soul, what would become of the 



242 ON THOUGHT AND ACTION. 

commercial and agricultural interests of this 
great (and once flourishing) country ? — I would 
not be understood as saying that there is not 
what may be called a genius for business, an ex- 
traordinary capacity for affairs, quickness and 
comprehension united, an insight into character, 
an acquaintance with a number of particular 
circumstances, a variety of expedients, a tact 
for finding out what will do : I grant all this (in 
Liverpool and Manchester they would persuade 
you that your merchant and manufacturer is 
your only gentleman and scholar) — but still, 
making every allowance for the difference be- 
tween the liberal trader and the sneaking shop- 
keeper, I doubt whether the most surprising 
success is to be accounted for from any such un- 
usual attainments, or whether a man's making 
half a million of money is a proof of his 
capacity for thought in general. It is much 
oftener owing to views and wishes bounded but 
constantly directed to one particular object. 
To succeed, a man should aim only at success. 
The child of Fortune should resign himself into 
the hands of Fortune. A plotting head fre- 
quently overreaches itself: a mind confident of 
its resources and calculating powers enters on 
critical speculations, which, in a game depend- 
ing so much on chance and unforeseen events, 



ON THOUGHT AND ACTION. C 2A<3 

and not entirely on intellectual skill, turn the 
odds greatly against any one in the long run. 
The rule of business is to take what you can get, 
and keep what you have got : or an eagerness 
in seizing every opportunity that offers for pro- 
moting your own interest, and a plodding per- 
severing industry in making the most of the 
advantages you have already obtained, are the 
most effectual as well as safest ingredients in 
the composition of the mercantile character. 
The world is a book in which the Chapter of 
Accidents is none of the least considerable ; or it 
is a machine that must be left, in a great mea- 
sure, to turn itself. The most that a worldly- 
minded man can do is to stand at the receipt 
of custom, and be constantly on the look-out 
for windfalls. The true devotee in this way 
waits for the revelations of Fortune as the poet 
waits for the inspiration of the Muse, and does 
not rashly anticipate her favours. He must be 
neither capricious nor wilful. I have known 
people untrammelled in the ways of business, 
but with so intense an apprehension of their 
own interest, that they would grasp at the 
slightest possibility of gain as a certainty, and 
were led into as many mistakes by an over- 
griping usurious disposition as they could have 
been by the most thoughtless extravagance. — 

r 2 



244 ON THOUGHT AND ACTION. 

We hear a great outcry about the want of judg- 
ment in men of genius. It is not a want of 
judgment, but an excess of other things. They 
err knowingly, and are wilfully blind. The un- 
derstanding is out of the question. The pro- 
found judgment which soberer people pique 
themselves upon is in truth a want of passion 
and imagination. Give them an interest in any 
thing, a sudden fancy, a bait for their favourite 
foible, and who so besotted as they? Stir their 
feelings, and farewel to their prudence ! The 
understanding operates as a motive to action 
only in the silence of the passions. I have 
heard people of a sanguine temperament re- 
proached with betting according to their wishes, 
instead of their opinion who should win : and I 
have seen those who reproached them do the 
very same thing the instant their own vanity 
or prejudices were concerned. The most me- 
chanical people, once thrown off their balance, 
are the most extravagant and fantastical. What 
passion is there so unmeaning and irrational as 
avarice itself? The Dutch went mad for tulips, 

and for love ! — To return to what 

was said a little way back, a question might be 
started, whether as thought relates to the whole 
circumference of things and interests, and busi- 
ness is confined to a very small part of them, viz* 



ON THOUGHT AND ACTION. 245 

to a knowledge of a man's own affairs and the 
making of his own fortune, whether a talent for 
the latter will not generally exist in proportion 
to the narrowness and grossness of his ideas, 
nothing drawing his attention out of his own 
sphere, or giving him an interest except in those 
things which he can realise and bring home 
to himself in the most undoubted shape? To 
the man of business all the world is a fable but 
the Stock-Exchange : to the money-getter no- 
thing has a real existence that he cannot con- 
vert into a tangible feeling, that he does not 
recognise as property, that he cannot " measure 
with a two-foot rule or count upon ten fingers." 
The want of thought, of imagination, drives the 
practical man upon immediate realities : to the 
poet or philosopher all is real and interesting 
that is true or possible, that can reach in its 
consequences to others, or be made a subject of 
curious speculation to himself! 

But is it right, then, to judge of action by 
the quantity of thought implied in it, any more 
than it would be to condemn a life of contempla- 
tion for being inactive ? Or has not every thing 
a source and principle of its own, to which we 
should refer it, and not to the principles of other 
things? He who succeeds in any pursuit in 
which others fail, may be presumed to have 



c 2i() ON THOUGHT AND ACTION. 

qualities of some sort or other which they are 
without. If he has not brilliant wit, he may 
have solid sense : if he has not subtlety of under- 
standing, he may have energy and firmness of 
purpose : if he has only a few advantages, he 
may have modesty and prudence to make the 
most of what he possesses. Propriety is one 
great matter in the conduct of life ; which, 
though like a graceful carriage of the body it is 
neither definable nor striking at first sight, is 
the result of finely balanced feelings, and lends 
a secret strength and charm to the whole cha- 
racter. 

Quicquid agit, quoquo vestigia vertit, 

Componit \furtim > subsequiturque decor. 

There are more ways than one in which the 
various faculties of the mind may unfold them- 
selves. Neither words nor ideas reducible to 
words constitute the utmost limit of human 
capacity. Man is not a merely talking nor a 
merely reasoning animal. Let us then take him 
as he is, instead of " curtailing him of nature's 
fair proportions" to suit our previous notions. 
Doubtless, there are great characters botli in 
active and contemplative life. There have been 
heroes as well as sages, legislators and founders 
of religion, historians and able statesmen and 



ON THOUGHT AND ACTION. C 2V/ 

generals, inventors of useful arts and instru- 
ments and explorers of undiscovered countries, 
as well as writers and readers of books. It will 
not do to set all these aside under any fasti- 
dious or pedantic distinction. Comparisons are 
odious, because they are impertinent, and lead 
only to the discovery of defects by making one 
thing the standard of another which has no re- 
lation to it. If, as some one proposed, we were 
to institute an inquiry, " Which was the greatest 
man, Milton or Cromwell, Buonaparte or Ru- 
bens ?" — we should have all the authors and 
artists on one side, and all the military men and 
the whole diplomatic body on the other, who 
would set to work with all their might to pull 
in pieces the idol of the other party, and the 
longer the dispute continued, the more would 
each grow dissatisfied with his favourite, though 
determined to allow no merit to any one else. 
The mind is not well competent to take in the 
full impression of more than one style of excel- 
lence or one extraordinary character at once ; 
contradictory claims puzzle and stupefy it ; and 
however admirable any individual may be in 
himself and unrivalled in his particular way, 
yet if we try him by others in a totally opposite 
class, that is, if we consider not what he was 
but what he was not, he will be found to be 



248 ON THOUGHT AND ACTION. 

nothing. We do not reckon up the excellences 
on either side, for then these would satisfy the 
mind and put an end to the comparison : we 
have no way of exclusively setting up our fa- 
vourite but by running down his supposed rival ; 
and for the gorgeous hues of Rubens, the lofty 
conceptions of Milton, the deep policy and cau- 
tious daring of Cromwell, or the dazzling ex- 
ploits and fatal ambition of the modern chieftain, 
the poet is transformed into a pedant, the artist 
sinks into a mechanic, the politician turns out 
no better than a knave, and the hero is exalted 
into a madman. It is as easy to get the start 
of our antagonist in argument by frivolous and 
vexatious objections to one side of the question 
as it is difficult to do full and heaped justice 
to the other. If I am asked which is the greatest 
of those who have been the greatest in different 
ways, I answer the one that we happen to be 
thinking of at the time, for while that is the 
case, we can conceive of nothing higher. — If 
there is a propensity in the vulgar to admire 
the achievements of personal prowess or in- 
stances of fortunate enterprise too much, it 
cannot be denied that those who have to weigh 
out and dispense the meed of fame in books, 
have been too much disposed, by a natural bias, 
to confine all merit and talent to the pro- 



ON THOUGHT AND ACTION. 249 

ductions of the pen, or at least to those works, 
which, being artificial or abstract representations 
of things, are transmitted to posterity, and cried 
up as models in their kind. This, though un- 
avoidable, is hardly just. Actions pass away 
and are forgotten, or are only discernible in 
their effects : conquerors, statesmen, and kings 
live but by their names stamped on the page of 
history. Hume says rightly that more people 
think about Virgil and Homer (and that con- 
tinually) than ever trouble their heads about 
Caesar or Alexander. In fact, poets are a longer- 
lived race than heroes : they breathe more of 
the air of immortality. They survive more 
entire in their thoughts and acts. We have all 
that Virgil or Homer did, as much as if we had 
lived at the same time with them : we can hold 
their works in our hands, or lay them on our 
pillows, or put them to our lips. Scarcely a 
trace of what the others did is left upon the 
earth, so as to be visible to common eyes. The 
one, the dead authors, are living men, still breath- 
ing and moving in their writings. The others, the 
conquerors of the world, are but the ashes in 
an urn. The sympathy (so to speak) between 
thought and thought is more intimate and vital 
than that between thought and action. Thought 
is linked to thought as flame kindles into flame : 



c 250 ON THOUGHT AND ACTION. 

the tribute of admiration to the manes of de- 
parted heroism is like burning incense in a 
marble monument. Words, ideas, feelings, with 
the progress of time harden into substances : 
things, bodies, actions, moulder away, or melt 
into a sound, into thin air ! — Yet though the 
Schoolmen in the middle ages disputed more 
about the texts of Aristotle than the battle of 
Arbela, perhaps Alexander's Generals in his 
life-time admired his pupil as much and liked 
him better. For not only a man's actions are 
effaced and vanish with him ; his virtues and 
generous qualities die with him also : — his in- 
tellect only is immortal and bequeathed unim- 
paired to posterity. Words are the only things 
that last for ever. 

If however the empire of words and general 
knowledge is more durable in proportion as it 
is abstracted and attenuated, it is less immediate 
and dazzling : if authors are as good after they 
are dead as when they were living, while living 
they might as well be dead : and moreover with 
respect to actual ability, to write a book is not 
the only proof of taste, sense, or spirit, as pedants 
would have us suppose. To do any thing well, 
to paint a picture, to fight a battle, to make a 
plough or a threshing-machine, requires, one 
would think, as much skill and judgment as to 



ON THOUGHT AND ACTION. c 25\ 

talk about or write a description of it when 
done. Words are universal, intelligible signs ? 
but they are not the only real, existing things. 
Did not Julius Caesar shew himself as much of 
a man in conducting his campaigns as in com- 
posing his Commentaries ? Or was the Retreat 
of the Ten Thousand under Xenophon, or his 
work of that name, the most consummate per- 
formance ? Or would not Lovelace, supposing 
him to have existed and to have conceived and 
executed all his fine stratagems on the spur of 
the occasion, have been as clever a fellow as 
Richardson who invented them in cold blood ? 
If to conceive and describe an heroic character 
is the height of a literary ambition, we can hardly 
make it out that to be and to do all that the 
wit of man can feign, is nothing. To use means 
to ends, to set causes in motion, to wield the 
machine of society, to subject the wills of others 
to your own, to manage abler men than yourself 
by means of that which is stronger in them than 
their wisdom, viz. their weakness and their folly, 
to calculate the resistance of ignorance and pre- 
judice to your designs, and by obviating to turn 
them to account, to foresee a long, obscure, 
and complicated train of events, of chances and 
openings of success, to unwind the web of others' 
policy and weave your own out of it, to judge 



£52 ON THOUGHT AND ACTION. 

of the effects of things not in the abstract but 
with reference to all their bearings, ramifica- 
tions and impediments, to understand character 
thoroughly, to see latent talent or lurking 
treachery, to know mankind for what they are, 
and use them as they deserve, to have a purpose 
steadily in view and to effect it after removing 
every obstacle, to master others and be true 
to yourself, asks power and knowledge, both 
nerves and brain. 

Such is the sort of talent that may be shewn 
and that has been possessed by the great leaders 
on the stage of the world. To accomplish great 
things argues, I imagine, great resolution : to 
design great things implies no common mind. 
Ambition is in some sort genius. Though I 
would rather wear out my life in arguing a 
broad speculative question than in caballing 
for the election to a wardmote, or canvassing 
for votes in a rotten borough, yet I should 
think that the loftiest Epicurean philosopher 
might descend from his punctilio to identify 
himself with the support of a great principle, 
or to prop a falling state. This is what the 
legislators and founders of empire did of old ; 
and the permanence of their institutions shewed 
the depth of the principles from which they 
emanated. A tragic poem is not the worse for 



ON THOUGHT AND ACTION. 258 

acting well : if it will not bear this test, it 
savours of effeminacy. Well-digested schemes 
will stand the touchstone of experience. Great 
thoughts reduced to practice become great acts. 
Again, great acts grow out of great occasions, 
and great occasions spring from great principles, 
working changes in society and tearing it up 
by the roots. But still I conceive that a genius 
for action depends essentially on the strength 
of the will rather than on that of the under- 
standing ; that the long-headed calculation of 
causes and consequences arises from the energy 
of the first cause, which is the will, setting 
others in motion and prepared to anticipate the 
results ; that its sagacity is activity delighting 
in meeting difficulties and adventures more 
than half way, and its wisdom courage not to 
shrink from danger, but to redouble its efforts 
with opposition. Its humanity, if it has much, 
is magnanimity to spare the vanquished, exult- 
ing in power but not prone to mischief, with 
good sense enough to be aware of the in- 
stability of fortune, and with some regard to 
reputation. — What may serve as a criterion to 
try this question by is the following consider- 
ation, that we sometimes find as remarkable a 
deficiency of the speculative faculty coupled 
with great strength of will and consequent 



c 254 ON THOUGHT AND ACTION. 

success in active life, as we do a want of volun- 
tary power and total incapacity for business 
frequently joined to the highest mental quali- 
fications. In some cases it will happen that 
" to be wise, is to be obstinate." If you are 
deaf to reason but stick to your own purposes, 
you will tire others out and bring them over to 
your way of thinking. Self-will and blind pre- 
judice are the best defence of actual power and 
exclusive advantages. The forehead of the 
late king was not remarkable for the character 
of intellect, but the lower part of his face was 
expressive of strong passions and fixed resolu- 
tion. Charles Fox had an animated, intelligent 
eye, and brilliant, elastic forehead (with a nose 
indicating fine taste), but the lower features 
were weak, unsettled, fluctuating, and without 
purchase — it was in them the Whigs were de- 
feated. What a fine iron binding Buonaparte 
had round his face, as if it had been cased 
in steel ! What sensibility about the mouth ! 
What watchful penetration in the eye ! What 
a smooth, unruffled forehead! Mr. Pitt, with 
little sunken eyes, had a high, retreating fore- 
head, and a nose expressing pride and aspiring 
self-opinion: it was on that (with submission) 
that he suspended the decisions of the House 
of Commons and dangled the Opposition as 



ON THOUGHT AND ACTION. 255 

lie pleased. Lord Castlereagh is a man rather 
deficient than redundant in words and topics. 
He is not (any more than St. Augustine was, 
in the opinion of La Fontaine) so great a 
wit as Rabelais, nor is he so great a philosopher 
as Aristotle : but he has that in him which 
is not to be trifled with. He has a noble mask 
of a face (not well filled up in the expression, 
which is relaxed and dormant) with a fine person 
and manner. On the strength of these he ha- 
zards his speeches in the House. He has also a 
knowledge of mankind, and of the composition 
of the House. He takes a thrust which he can- 
not parry on his shield — is " all tranquillity and 
smiles" under a volley of abuse, sees when to 
pay a compliment to a wavering antagonist, 
soothes the melting mood of his hearers, or gets 
up a speech full of indignation, and knows how 
to bestow his attentions on that great public 
body, whether he wheedles or bullies, so as to 
bring it to compliance. With a long reach of 
undefined purposes (the result of a temper too 
indolent for thought, too violent for repose) he 
has equal perseverance and pliancy in bringing 
his objects to pass. I would rather be Lord 
Castlereagh, as far as a sense of power is con- 
cerned (principle is out of the question) than 
such a man as Mr. Canning, who is a mere fluent 



2.56 ON THOUGHT AND ACTION. 

sophist, and never knows the limits of discre- 
tion or the effect which will be produced by 
what he says, except as far as florid common- 
places may be depended on. Buonaparte is re- 
ferred by Mr. Coleridge to the class of active 
rather than of intellectual characters: and Cow- 
ley has left an invidious but splendid eulogy on 
Oliver Cromwell, which sets out on much the 
same principle. " What," he says, " can be 
more extraordinary, than that a person of mean 
birth, no fortune, no eminent qualities of body, 
which have sometimes, or of mind, which have 
often raised men to the highest dignities, should 
have the courage to attempt, and the happiness 
to succeed in, so improbable a design, as the de- 
struction of one of the most ancient and most 
solidly-founded monarchies upon the earth? That 
he should have the power or boldness to put his 
prince and master to an open and infamous 
death ; to banish that numerous and strongly- 
allied family ; to do all this under the name and 
wages of a Parliament ; to trample upon them 
too as he pleased, and spurn them out of doors 
when he grew weary of them ; to raise up a 
new and unheard-of monster out of their ashes ; 
to stifle that in the very infancy, and set up 
himself above all things that ever were called 
sovereign in England; to oppress all his enemies 



ON THOUGHT AND ACTION. 2.57 

by arms, and all his friends afterwards by artifice ; 
to serve all parties patiently for a while, and to 
command them victoriously at last; to over-run 
each corner of the three nations, and overcome 
with equal facility both the riches of the soutlt 
and the poverty of the north ; to be feared and 
courted by all foreign princes, and adopted a 
brother to the Gods of the earth; to call together 
Parliaments with a word of his pen, and scatter 
them again with the breath of his mouth ; to be 
humbly and daily petitioned that he would please 
to be hired, at the rate of two millions a year, to 
be the master of those who had hired him before 
to be their servant; to have the estates and lives 
of three kingdoms as much at his disposal, as 
was the little inheritance of his father, and to be 
as noble and liberal in the spending of them ; 
and lastly, (for there is no end of all the par- 
ticulars of his glory) to bequeath all this with 
one word to his posterity'; to die with peace at 
home, and triumph abroad; to be buried among 
kings, and with more than regal solemnity ; and to 
leave a name behind him, not to be extinguished 
but with the whole world ; which as it is now 
too little for his praises, so might have been too 
[narrow] for his conquests, if the short line of 
his human life could have been stretched out to 
the extent of his immortal designs!" 

s 



25S ON THOUGHT AND ACTION. 

Cromwell was a bad speaker and a worse 
writer. Milton wrote his dispatches for him in 
elegant and erudite Latin : and the pen of the 
one, like the sword of the other, was " sharp 
" and sweet." We have not that union in mo- 
dern times of the heroic and literary character 
which was common among the ancients. Julius 
Caesar and Xenophon recorded their own acts 
with equal clearness of style and modesty of 
temper. The Duke of Wellington (worse off 
than Cromwell) is obliged to get Mr. Mudford 
to write the History of his Life. Sophocles, 
iEschylus, and Socrates were distinguished for 
their military prowess among their contempo- 
raries, though now only remembered for what 
they did in poetry and philosophy. Cicero and 
Demosthenes, the two greatest orators of an- 
tiquity, appear to have been cowards : Nor 
does Horace seem to give a very favourable 
picture of his martial achievements. But in 
general there was not that division in the labours 
of the mind and body among the Greeks and 
Romans that has been introduced among us 
either by the progress of civilisation or by a 
greater slowness and inaptitude of parts. The 
French, for instance, appear to unite a number 
of accomplishments, the literary character and 
the man of the world, better than we do. 



ON THOUGHT AND ACTION, 259 

Among us, a scholar is almost another name for 
a pedant or a clown : it is not so with them. 
Their philosophers and wits went into the world 
and mingled in the society of the fair. Of 
this there needs no other proof than the spirited 
print of most of the great names in French 
literature, to whom Moliere is reading a comedy 
in the presence of the celebrated Ninon de 
PEnclos. D'Alembert, one of the first mathe- 
maticians of his age, was a wit, a man of gallantry 
and letters. With us a learned man is absorbed 
in himself and some particular study, and minds 
nothing else. There is something ascetic and 
impracticable in his very constitution, and he 
answers to the description of the Monk in 
Spenser — 

" From every work he challenged essoin 
For contemplation's sake" 

Perhaps the superior importance attached to the 
institutions of religion, as well as the more ab- 
stracted and visionary nature of its objects, has 
led (as a general result) to a wider separation 
between thought and action in modern times. — 
Ambition is of a higher and more heroic 
strain than avarice. Its objects are nobler, and 
the means by which it attains its ends less 
mechanical. 

s2 



%C)0 ON THOUGHT AND ACTION. 

" Better be lord of them that riches have, 

Than riches have myself, and be their servile slave." 

The incentive to ambition is the love of 
power ; the spur to avarice is either the fear of 
poverty, or a strong desire of self-indulgence. 
The amassers of fortunes seem divided into two 
opposite classes, lean, penurious-looking mortals* 
or jolly fellows who are determined to get pos- 
session of, because they want to enjoy the good 
things of the world. The one have famine and 
a work-house always before their eyes, the others 
in the fulness of their persons and the robust- 
ness of their constitutions seem to bespeak the 
reversion of a landed estate, rich acres, fat 
beeves, a substantial mansion, costly clothing, a 
chine and turkey, choice wines, and all other 
good things consonant to the wants and full-fed 
desires of their bodies. Such men charm for- 
tune by the sleekness of their aspects and the 
goodly rotundity of their honest faces, as the 
others scare away poverty by their wan, meagre 
looks. The last starve themselves into riches 
by care and carking ; the first eat, drink, and 
sleep their way into the good things of this life. 
The greatest number of warm men in the city 
are good, jolly fellows. Look at Sir William 

Callipash and callipee are written in his 

face : he rolls about his unwieldy bulk in a sea 



ON THOUGHT AND ACTION. 2()1 

of turtle-soup. How many haunches of venison 
does he carry on his back ! He is larded with jobs 
and contracts ; he is stuffed and swelled out 
with layers of bank-notes, and invitations to 
dinner ! His face hangs out a flag of defiance to 
mischance : the roguish twinkle in his eye with 
which he lures half the city and beats Alderman 

Jiollow, is a smile reflected from heaps of 

unsunned gold ! Nature and Fortune are not so 
much at variance as to differ about this fellow. 
To enjoy the good the Gods provide us, is to 
deserve it. Nature meant him for a Knight, 
Alderman, and City- Member ; and Fortune 
laughed to see the goodly person and prospects 
of the man ! # — I am not, from certain early pre- 

* A thorough fitness for any end implies the means. Where 
there is a will, there is a way. A real passion, an entire de- 
votion to any object, always succeeds. The strong sympathy 
with what we wish and imagine, realizes it, dissipates all ob- 
stacles, and removes all scruples. The disappointed lover 
may complain as much as he pleases. He was himself to 
blame. He was a halfwitted, wishy-voashy fellow. His love 
might be as great as he makes it out : but it was not his 
ruling-passion. His fear, his pride, his vanity was greater. 
Let any one's whole soul be steeped in this passion, let him 
think and care for nothing else, let nothing divert, cool or 
intimidate him, let the ideal feeling become an actual one 
and take possession of his whole faculties, looks and manner, 
let the same voluptuous hopes and wishes govern Lis actions 



26'2 ON THOUGHT AND ACTION. 

judices, much given to admire the ostentatious 
marks of wealth (there are persons enough to 
admire them without me)— but I confess, there 
is something in the look of the old banking- 
houses in Lombard-street, the posterns covered 
with mud, the doors opening sullenly and 
silently, the absence of all pretence, the dark- 
ness and the gloom within, the gleaming of 
lamps in the day-time, 

" Like a faint shadow of uncertain light," 

that almost realises the poetical conception of 
the cave of Mammon in Spenser, where dust 
and cobwebs concealed the roofs and pillars of 

in the presence of his mistress that haunt his fancy in her 
absence, and I will answer for his success. But I will not 
answer for the success of " a dish of skimmed milk " in such 
a case. — I could always get to see a fine collection of pic- 
tures myself. The fact is, I was set upon it. Neither the 
surliness of porters, nor the impertinence of footmen could 
keep me back. I had a portrait of Titian in my eye, and 
nothing could put me out in my determination. If that had 
not (as it were) been looking on me all the time I was battling 
my way, I should have been irritated or disconcerted, and 
gone away. But my liking to the end conquered my scruples 
or aversion to the means. I never understood the Scotch 
character but on these occasions. I would not take " No" 
for an answer. If I had wanted a place under government 
or a writership to India, I could have got it from the same 
importunity, and on the same terms. 



ON THOUGHT AND ACTION. 263 

solid gold, and lifts the mind quite off its ordi- 
nary hinges. The account of the manner in 
which the founder of Guy's Hospital accumu- 
lated his immense wealth has always to me some- 
thing romantic in it, from the same force of con- 
trast. He was a little shop-keeper, and out of 
his savings, bought Bibles and purchased sea- 
men's tickets in Queen Anne's wars, by which 
he left a fortune of two hundred thousand 
pounds. The story suggests the idea of a ma- 
gician ; nor is there any thing in the Arabian 
Nights that looks more like a fiction. 



ESSAY XII. 

ON WILL-MAKING. 



ESSAY XII. 
ON WILL-MAKING. 



Few things show the human character in a 
more ridiculous light than the circumstance of 
will-making. It is the latest opportunity we 
have of exercising the natural perversity of the 
disposition, and we take care to make a good 
use of it. We husband it with jealousy, put it 
off as long as we can, and then use every pre- 
caution that the world shall be no gainer by our 
deaths. This last act of our lives seldom belies 
the former tenor of them, for stupidity, caprice, 
and unmeaning spite. All that we seem to 
think of is to manage matters so (in settling ac- 
counts with those who are so unmannerly as to 
survive us) as to do as little good, and to plague 
and disappoint as many people as possible. 

Many persons have a superstition on the sub- 
ject of making their last will and testament, and 
think that when every thing is ready signed and 
sealed, there is nothing farther left to delay 
their departure. I have heard of an instance of , 



268 ON WILL-MAKING. 

one person who having a feeling of this kind on 
his mind, and being teazed into making his will 
by those about him, actually fell ill with pure 
apprehension, and thought he was going to die 
in good earnest, but having executed the deed 
over-night, awoke, to his great surprise, the next 
morning, and found himself as well as ever he 
was*. An elderly gentleman possessed of a 
good estate and the same idle notion, and who 
found himself in a dangerous way, was anxious 
to do this piece of justice to those who remained 
behind him, but when it came to the point, his 
heart failed him, and his nervous fancies re- 
turned in full force : — even on his death-bed, 
he still held back and was averse to sign what 
he looked upon as his own death-warrant, and 

* A poor woman at Plymouth who did not like the 
formality, or could not afford the expence of a will, thought 
to leave what little property she had in wearing-apparel and 
household moveables to her friends and relations, viva voce, 
and before Death stopped her breath. She gave and willed 
away (of her proper authority) her chair and table to one, her 
bed to another, an old cloak to a third, a night-cap and 
petticoat to a fourth, and so on. The old crones sat weep- 
ing round, and soon after carried off all they could lay their 
hands upon, and left their benefactress to her fate. They were 
no sooner gone than she unexpectedly recovered, and sent to 
have her things back again ; but not one of them could she 
,get, and she was left without a rag to her back, or a friend to 
condole with her. 



ON WILL-MAKING. 269 

just at the last gasp, amidst the anxious looks 
and silent upbraidings of friends and relatives 
that surrounded him, he summoned resolution 
to hold out his feeble hand which was guided 
by others to trace his name, and he fell back 
— a corpse ! If there is any pressing rea- 
son for it, that is, if any particular person would 
be relieved from a state of harassing uncertainty, 
or materially benefited by their making a will, 
the old and infirm (who do not like to be put 
out of their way) generally make this an excuse 
to themselves for putting it off to the very last 
moment, probably till it is too late : or where 
this is sure to make the greatest number of blank 
faces, contrive to give their friends the slip, 
without signifying their final determination in 
their favour. Where some unfortunate indi- 
vidual has been kept long in suspense, who has 
been perhaps sought out for that very purpose, 
and who may be in a great measure dependent 
on this as a last resource, it is nearly a certainty 
that there will be no will to be found ; no trace, 
no sign to discover whether the person dying 
thus intestate ever had any intention of the 
sort, or why they relinquished it. This it is to 
bespeak the thoughts and imaginations of others 
for victims after we are dead, as well as their 
persons and expectations for hangers-on while 



270 ON WILL-MAKING. 

we are living. A celebrated beauty of the 
middle of the last century, towards its close 
sought out a female relative, the friend and 
companion of her youth, who had lived during 
the forty years of their separation in rather 
straitened circumstances, and in a situation 
which admitted of some alleviations. Twice 
they met after that long lapse of time — once 
her relation visited her in the splendour of a 
rich old family-mansion, and once she crossed 
the country to become an inmate of the humble 
dwelling of her early and only remaining friend. 
What was this for ? Was it to revive the image 
of her youth in the pale and care-worn face of 
her friend ? Or was it to display the decay of her 
charms and recal her long-forgotten triumphs to 
the memory of the only person who could bear 
witness to them? Was it to show the proud 
remains of herself to those who remembered or 
had often heard what she was — her skin like 
shrivelled alabaster, her emaciated features 
chiseled by nature's finest hand, her eyes that 
when a smile lighted them up, still shone like 
diamonds, the vermilion hues that still bloomed 
among wrinkles ? Was it to talk of bone-lace, 
'of the flounces and brocades of the last century, 
of race-balls in the year 62, and of the scores 
of lovers that had died at her feet, and to set 



ON WILL-MAKING. 271 

whole counties in a flame again, only with a 
dream of faded beauty? Whether it was for 
this, or whether she meant to leave her friend 
any thing (as was indeed expected, all things 
considered, not without reason) nobody knows 
— for she never breathed a syllable on the sub- 
ject herself, and died without a will. The ac- 
complished coquet of twenty, who had pampered 
hopes only to kill them, who had kindled rapture 
with a look and extinguished it with a breath, 
could find no better employment at seventy 
than to revive the fond recollections and raise up 
the drooping hopes of her kinswoman only to let 
them fall — to rise no more. Such is the delight 
we have in trifling with and tantalising the feel- 
ings of others by the exquisite refinements, the 
studied sleights of love or friendship ! 

Where a property is actually bequeathed, sup- 
posing the circumstances of the case and the 
usages of society to leave a practical discretion 
to the testator, it is most frequently in such 
portions as can be of the least service. Where 
there is much already, much is given; where 
much is wanted, little or nothing. Poverty 
invites a sort of pity, a miserable dole of assist- 
ance ; necessity neglect and scorn ; wealth at- 
tracts and allures to itself more wealth, by natural 
association of ideas, or by that innate love of 



27^ ON WILL-MAKING. 

inequality and injustice, which is the favourite 
principle of the imagination. Men like to col- 
lect money into large heaps in their life-time : 
they like to leave it in large heaps after they 
are dead. They grasp it into their own hands, 
not to use it for their own good, but to hoard, 
to lock it up, to make an object, an idol, and a 
wonder of it. Do you expect them to distribute 
it so as to do others good ; that they will like 
those who come after them better than them- 
selves ; that if they were willing to pinch and 
starve themselves, they will not deliberately 
defraud their sworn friends and nearest kindred 
of what would be of the utmost use to them ? 
No, they will thrust their heaps of gold and 
silver into the hands of others (as their proxies) 
to keep for them untouched, still increasing, 
still of no use to any one, but to pamper pride 
and avarice, to glitter in the huge, watchful, 
insatiable eye of fancy, to be deposited as a 
new offering at the shrine of Mammon, their 
God — this is with them to put it to its in- 
telligible and proper use, this is fulfilling a 
sacred, indispensable duty, this cheers them 
in the solitude of the grave, and throws a gleam 
of satisfaction across the stony eye of death. But 
to think of frittering it down, of sinking it in 
charity, of throwing it away on the idle claims of 



ON WILE-MAKING. 273 

humanity, where it would no longer peer in 
monumental pomp over their heads ; and that 
too when on the point of death themselves, in 
articulo mortis, oh ! it would be madness, waste, 
extravagance, impiety! — Thus worldlings feel 
and argue without knowing it ; and while they 
fancy they are studying their own interest or 
that of some booby successor, their alter idem, 
are but the dupes and puppets of a favourite 
idea, a phantom, a prejudice, that must be kept 
up somewhere (no matter where) if it still plays 
before and haunts their imagination while they 
have sense or understanding left — to cling to 
their darling follies. 

There was a remarkable instance of this 
tendency to the heap, this desire to cultivate an 
abstract passion for wealth, in a will of one 
of the Thellusons some time back. This will 
went to keep the greater part of a large property 
from the use of the natural heirs and next- 
of-kin for a length of time, and to let it ac- 
cumulate at compound interest in such a way 
and so long, that it would at last mount up in 
value to the purchase-money of a whole county. 
The interest accruing from the funded property 
or the rent of the lands at certain periods was 
to be employed to purchase other estates, other 

T 



274 ON WILL-MAKING. 

parks and manors in the neighbourhood or 
farther off, so that the prospect of the future 
desmesne that was to devolve at some distant 
time to the unborn lord of acres, swelled and 
enlarged itself, like a sea, circle without circle, 
vista beyond vista, till the imagination was stag- 
gered, and the mind exhausted. Now here was 
a scheme for the accumulation of wealth and 
for laying the foundation of family-aggrandise- 
ment purely imaginary, romantic — one might 
almost say, disinterested. The vagueness, the 
magnitude, the remoteness of the object, the 
resolute sacrifice of all immediate and gross ad- 
vantages, clothe it with the privileges of an ab- 
stract idea, so that the project has the air of a 
fiction or of a story in a novel. It was an instance 
of what might be called posthumous avarice, 
like the love of posthumous fame. It had little 
more to do with selfishness than if the testator 
had appropriated the same sums in the same 
way to build a pyramid, to construct an aque- 
duct, to endow an hospital, or effect any other 
patriotic or merely fantastic purpose. He wished 
to heap up a pile of wealth (millions of acres) 
in the dim horizon of future years, that could 
be of no use to him or to those with whom he 
was connected by positive and personal ties, 



ON WILL-MAKING. c 2Ju 

but as a crotchet of the brain, a gew-gaw of the 
fancy # . Yet to enable himself to put this scheme 
in execution, he had perhaps toiled and watched 
all his life, denied himself rest, food, pleasure, 
liberty, society, and persevered with the patience 
and self-denial of a martyr. I have insisted on 
this point the more, to shew how much of the 
imaginary and speculative there is interfused 
even in those passions and purposes which have 
not the good of others for their object, and how 
little reason this honest citizen and builder of 
castles in the air would have had to treat those 
who devoted themselves to the pursuit of fame, 
to obloquy and persecution for the sake of truth 
and liberty, or who sacrificed their lives for 
their country in a just cause, as visionaries and 
enthusiasts, who did not understand what was 
properly due to their own interest and the 
securing of the main-chance. Man is not the 
creature of sense and selfishness, even in those 
pursuits which grow up out of that origin, so 
much as of imagination, custom, passion, whim, 
and humour. 

I have heard of a singular instance of a will 
made by a person who was addicted to a habit 

* The law of primogeniture has its origin in the principle 
here stated, the desire of perpetuating some one palpable 
and prominent proof of wealth and power. 

T 2 



276 ON WILL-MAKING. 

of lying. He was so notorious for this propensity 
(not out of spite or cunning, but as a gratuitous 
exercise of invention) that from a child no one 
could ever believe a syllable he uttered. From 
the want of any dependence to be placed on 
him, he became the jest and bye-word of the 
school where he was brought up. The last act 
of his life did not disgrace him. For having 
gone abroad, and falling into a dangerous de- 
cline, he was advised to return home. He paid 
all that he was worth for his passage, went on 
ship-board, and employed the few remaining 
days he had to live in making and executing 
his will ; in which he bequeathed large estates 
in different parts of England, money in the 
funds, rich jewels, rings, and all kinds of valu- 
ables to his old friends and acquaintance, who 
not knowing how far the force of nature could 
go, were not for some time convinced that all 
this fairy wealth had never had an existence 
any where but in the idle coinage of his brain, 
whose whims and projects were no more ! — The 
extreme keeping in this character is only to be 
accounted for by supposing such an original 
constitutional levity as made truth entirely in- 
different to him, and the serious importance 
attached to it by others an object of perpetual 
sport and ridicule ! 



ON WILL-MAKING. 277 

The art of will-making chiefly consists in 
baffling the importunity of expectation. I do 
not so much find fault with this when it is done 
as a punishment and oblique satire on servility 
and selfishness. It is in that case Diamond cut 
Diamond — a trial of skill between the legacy- 
hunter and the legacy-maker which shall fool 
the other. The cringing toad-eater, the officious 
tale-bearer, is perhaps well paid for years of 
obsequious attendance with a bare mention and 
a mourning-ring ; nor can I think that Gil Bias' 
library w r as not quite as much as the coxcombry 
of his pretensions deserved. There are some 
admirable scenes in Ben Jonson's Volpone, 
shewing the humours of a legacy-hunter, and 
the different ways of fobbing him off with ex- 
cuses and assurances of not being forgotten. 
Yet it is hardly right, after all, to encourage 
this kind of pitiful, bare-faced intercourse, with- 
out meaning to pay for it, as the coquet has no 
right to jilt the lovers she has trifled with. 
Flattery and submission are marketable com- 
modities like any other, have their price, and 
ought scarcely to be obtained under false pre- 
tences. If we see through and despise the 
wretched creature that attempts to impose on 
our credulity, we can at any time dispense with 
his services : if we are soothed b\ this mocken 



278 ON WILL-MAKING. 

of respect and friendship, why not pay him like 
any other drudge, or as we satisfy the actor who 
performs a part in a play by our particular de- 
sire ? But often these premeditated disappoint- 
ments are as unjust as they are cruel, and are 
marked with circumstances of indignity, in pro- 
portion to the worth of the object. The sus- 
pecting, the taking it for granted that your 
name is down in the will, is sufficient provoca- 
tion to have it struck out : the hinting at an 
obligation, the consciousness of it on the part 
of the testator, will make him determined to 
avoid the formal acknowledgment of it, at any 
expence. The disinheriting of relations is 
mostly for venial offences, not for base ac- 
tions : we punish out of pique, to revenge 
some case in which we have been disappointed 
of our wills, some act of disobedience to what 
had no reasonable ground to go upon ; and we 
are obstinate in adhering to our resolution, as it 
was sudden and rash, and doubly bent on assert- 
ing our authority in what we have least right to 
interfere in. It is the wound inflicted upon 
our self-love, not the stain upon the character 
of the thoughtless offender, that calls for condign 
punishment. Crimes, vices may go unchecked, 
or unnoticed : but it is the laughing at our 
weaknesses, or thwarting our humours, that is 



ON WILL-MAKING. l 279 

never to be forgotten. It is not the errors of 
others, but our own miscalculations, on which 
we wreak our lasting vengeance. It is our- 
selves that we cannot forgive. In the will of 
Nicholas Gimcrack, the virtuoso recorded in 
the Tatler, we learn, among other items, that his 
eldest son is cut off with a single cockle-shell 
for his undutiful behaviour in laughing at his 
little sister whom his father kept preserved in 
spirits of wine. Another of his relations has a 
collection of grasshoppers bequeathed him, as 
in the testator's opinion an adequate reward 
and acknowledgment due to his merit. The 
whole will of the said Nicholas Gimcrack, Esq. 
is a curious document and exact picture of the 
mind of the worthy virtuoso defunct, where 
his various follies, littlenesses, and quaint hu- 
mours are set forth, as orderly and distinct as 
his butterflies' wings and cockle-shells and 
skeletons of fleas in glass-cases*. We often 

* It is as follows : 

" The Will of a Virtuoso. 
" I Nicholas Gimcrack, being in sound Health of Mind, 
but in great Weakness of Body, do by this my Last Will 
and Testament bequeath my worldly Goods and Chattels 
in Manner following: 
Imprimis, To my dear Wife, 
One Box of Butterflies, 
One Drawer of Shells, 



^80 ON WILL-MAKING. 

successfully try in this way to give the finishing 
stroke to our pictures, hang up our weaknesses 

A Female Skeleton, 

A dried Cockatrice. 

Item, To my Daughter Elizabeth, 

My Receipt for preserving dead Caterpillars. 
As also my Preparations of Winter May-Dew, and Era- 
brio Pickle. 
Item, To my little Daughter Fanny, 
Three Crocodile's Eggs. 
And upon the Birth of her first Child, if she marries with 

her Mother's Consent, 
The Nest of a Humming-Bird. 
Item, To my eldest Brother, as an Acknowledgment for the 
Lands he has vested in my Son Charles, I bequeath 
My last Year's Collection of Grasshoppers. 
Item, To his Daughter Susanna, being his only Child, I 
bequeath my 
English Weeds pasted on Royal Paper, 
With my large Folio of Indian Cabbage. 



Having fully provided for my Nephew Isaac, by making 
over to him some Years since 

A Horned Scarabceus, 

The Skin of a Rattle-Snake, and 

The Mummy of an Egyptian King, 
I make no further Provision for him in this my Will. 

My eldest Son John having spoken disrespectfully of his 
little Sister, whom I keep by me in Spirits of Wine, and in 
many other Instances behaved himself undutifully towards 
me, I do disinherit, and wholly cut off from any Part of this 
my Personal Estate, by giving him a single Cockle-Shell. 



ON WILL-MAKING. C AS1 

in perpetuity, and embalm our mistakes in the 
memories of others. 

" Even from the tomb the voice of nature cries, 
Even in our ashes live their wonted fires." 

I shall not speak here of unwarrantable com- 
mands imposed upon survivors, by which they 
were to carry into effect the sullen and revenge- 
ful purposes of unprincipled men, after they 
had breathed their last : but we meet with con- 
tinual examples of the desire to keep up the 
farce (if not the tragedy) of life, after we, the 
performers in it, have quitted the stage, and to 
have our parts rehearsed by proxy. We thus 
make a caprice immortal, a peculiarity pro- 
verbial. Hence we see the number of legacies 
and fortunes left, on condition that the legatee 
shall take the name and style of the testator, 
by which device we provide for the continu- 

To my Second Son Charles, I give and bequeath all my 
Flowers, Plants, Minerals, Mosses, Shells, Pebbles, Fossils, 
Beetles, Butterflies, Caterpillars, Grasshoppers, and Vermin, 
not above specified : As also all my Monsters, both wet and 
dry, making the said Charles whole and sole Executor of 
this my Last Will and Testament, he paying or causing to 
be paid the aforesaid Legacies within the Space of Six 
Months after my Decease. And I do hereby revoke all 
other Wills whatsoever by me formerly made." — Tatlljk, 
Vol. IV. No. 216. 



282 ON WILL-MAKING. 

ance of the sounds that formed our names, and 
endow them with an estate, that they may be 
repeated with proper respect. In the Memoirs 
of an Heiress, all the difficulties of the plot 
turn on the necessity imposed by a clause in 
her uncle's will that her future husband should 
take the family-name of Beverley. Poor Cecilia! 
What delicate perplexities she was thrown into 
by this improvident provision ; and with what 
minute, endless, intricate distresses has the fair 
authoress been enabled to harrow up the reader 
on this account ! There was a Sir Thomas 
Dyot in the reign of Charles II. who left the 
whole range of property which forms Dyot- 
street, in St. Giles's, and the neighbourhood, on 
the sole and express condition that it should be 
appropriated entirely to that sort of buildings, 
and to the reception of that sort of population, 
which still keeps undisputed, undivided pos- 
session of it. The name was changed the other 
day to George-street as a more genteel appel- 
lation, which, I should think, is an indirect 
forfeiture of the estate. This Sir Thomas Dyot 
I should be disposed to put upon the list of old 
English worthies — as humane, liberal, and no 
flincher from what he took in his head. He 
was no common-place man in his line. He was 
the best commentator on that old-fashioned 



ON WILL-MAKIXG. <28o 

text — " The foxes have holes, and the birds of 
the air have nests, but the Son of man hath not 
where to lay his head." — We find some that 
are curious in the mode in which they shall be 
buried, and others in the place. Lord Camel- 
ford had his remains buried under an ash -tree 
that grew on one of the mountains in Switzer- 
land ; and Sir Francis Bourgeois had a little 
mausoleum built for him in the college at Dul- 
wich, where he once spent a pleasant, jovial 
day with the masters and wardens*. It is, no 
doubt, proper to attend, except for strong 
reasons to the contrary, to these sort of re- 
quests ; for by breaking faith with the dead, 
we loosen the confidence of the living. Be- 
sides, there is a stronger argument : we sym- 
pathise with the dead as well as with the living, 
and are bound to them by the most sacred of 
all ties, our own involuntary fellow-feeling with 
others ! 

Thieves, as a last donation, leave advice to 
their friends, physicians a nostrum, authors a 

* Kellerman lately left his heart to be buried in the field 
of Valmy where the first great battle was fought in the 
year 1792, in which the Allies were repulsed. Oh! might 
that heart prove the root from which the tree of Liberty 
may spring up and flourish once more, as the basil-tree grew 
and grew from the cherished head of Isabella's lover! 



284 ON WJLL-MAKING. 

manuscript work, rakes a confession of their 
faith in the virtue of the sex — all, the last 
drivellings of their egotism and impertinence. 
One might suppose that if any thing could, the 
approach and contemplation of death might 
bring men to a sense of reason and self-know- 
ledge. On the contrary, it seems only to de- 
prive them of the little wit they had, and to 
make them even more the sport of their wilful- 
ness and short-sightedness. Some men think 
that because they are going to be hanged, they 
are fully authorised to declare a future state of 
rewards and punishments. All either indulge 
their caprices or cling to their prejudices. They 
make a desperate attempt to escape from re- 
flection by taking hold of any whim or fancy 
that crosses their minds, or by throwing them- 
selves implicitly on old habits and attach- 
ments. 

An old man is twice a child : the dying man 
becomes the property of his family. He has 
no choice left, and his voluntary power is 
merged in old saws and prescriptive usages. 
The property we have derived from our kindred 
reverts tacitly to them : and not to let it take its 
course, is a sort of violence done to nature as well 
as custom. The idea of property, of something 
in common, does not mix cordially with friend- 



ON WILL-MAKING. <285 

ship, but is inseparable from near relationship. 
We owe a return in kind, where we feel no 
obligation for a favour ; and consign our pos- 
sessions to our next of kin as mechanically as 
we lean our heads on the pillow, and go out of 
the world in the same state of stupid amaze- 
ment that we came into it ! Ccetera desunL 



ESSAY XIII. 

ON CERTAIN INCONSISTENCIES IN SIR 
JOSHUA REYNOLDS'S DISCOURSES. 



ESSAY XIII. 

ON CERTAIN INCONSISTENCIES IN SIR 
JOSHUA REYNOLDS'S DISCOURSES. 



The two chief points which Sir Joshua aims 
at in his Discourses are to shew that excel- 
lence in the Fine Arts is the result of pains 
and study, rather than of genius, and that all 
beauty, grace and grandeur are to be found, 
not in actual nature, but in an idea existing in 
the mind. On both these points he appears to 
have fallen into considerable inconsistencies or 
very great latitude of expression, so as to make 
it difficult to know what conclusion to draw 
from his various reasonings. I shall attempt 
little more in this Essay than to bring together 
several passages, that from their contradictory 
import seem to imply some radical defect in 
Sir Joshua's theory, and a doubt as to the pos- 
sibility of placing an implicit reliance on his 
authority. 

To begin witli the first of these subjects, the 
question of original genius. In the Second 

u 



290 ON CERTAIN INCONSISTENCIES IN 

Discourse, On the Method of Study, Sir Joshua 
observes towards the end, 

" There is one precept, however, in which I 
shall only be opposed by the vain, the ignorant, 
and the idle. I am not afraid that I shall re- 
peat it too often. You must have no dependence 
on your own genius. If you have great talents, 
industry will improve them : if you have but 
moderate abilities, industry will supply their 
deficiency. Nothing is denied to well-directed 
labour ; nothing is to be obtained without it. 
Not to enter into metaphysical discussions on 
the nature or essence of genius, I will venture 
to assert, that assiduity unabated by difficulty 
and a disposition eagerly directed to the object 
of its pursuit, will produce effects similar to 
those which some call the result of natural 
powers." — Vol. I. p. 44. 

The only tendency of the maxim here laid 
down seems to be to lure those students on 
with the hopes of excellence who have no 
chance of succeeding, and to deter those who 
have, from relying on the only prop and source 
of real excellence — the strong bent and impulse 
of their natural powers. Industry alone can only 
produce mediocrity ; but mediocrity in art is not 
worth the trouble of industry. Genius, great 
natural powers will give industry and ardour in 



m 



sir joshua reynolds's discourses. 291 

the pursuit of their proper object, but not if you 
divert them from that object into the trammels 
of common-place mechanical labour. By this 
method you neutralise all distinction of cha- 
racter — make a pedant of the blockhead and a 
drudge of the man of genius. What, for in- 
stance, would have been the effect of persuading 
Hogarth or Rembrandt to place no dependence 
on their own genius, and to apply themselves to 
the general study of the different branches of 
the art and of every sort of excellence, with 
a confidence of success proportioned to their 
misguided efforts, but to destroy both those 
great artists ? " You take my house when you 
do take the prop that doth sustain my house !" 
You undermine the superstructure of art when 
you strike at its main pillar and support, con- 
fidence and faith in nature. We might as well 
advise a person who had discovered a silver or 
lead mine on his estate to close it up, or the 
common farmer to plough up every acre he rents 
in the hope of discovering hidden treasure, as 
advise the man of original genius to neglect his 
particular vein for the study of rules and the 
imitation of others, or try to persuade the man 
of no strong natural powers that he can supply 
their deficiency by laborious application. — Sir 
Joshua soon after, in the Third Discourse, 

u 2 



292 ON CERTAIN INCONSISTENCIES IN 

alluding to the terms, inspiration, genius, gusto, 
applied by critics and orators to painting, pro- 
ceeds, 

" Such is the warmth with which both the 
Ancients and Moderns speak of this divine 
principle of the art ; but, as I have formerly 
observed, enthusiastick admiration seldom pro- 
motes knowledge. Though a student by such 
praise may have his attention roused and a 
desire excited of running in this great career ; 
yet it is possible that what has been said to 
excite, may only serve to deter him. He exa- 
mines his own mind, and perceives there 
nothing of that divine inspiration, with which, 
he is told, so many others have been favoured. 
He never travelled to heaven to gather new 
ideas ; and he finds himself possessed of no 
other qualifications than what mere common 
observation and a plain understanding can con- 
fer. Thus he becomes gloomy amidst the 
splendour of figurative declamation, and thinks 
it hopeless to pursue an object which he sup- 
poses out of the reach of human industry." — 
Vol. I. p. 56. 

Yet presently after he adds, 

" It is not easy to define in what this great 
style consists ; nor to describe by words the 
proper means of acquiring it, if the mind of the 



sir joshua Reynolds's discourses. Q93 

student should be at all capable of such an acqui- 
sition. Could we teach taste or genius by rules, 
they would be no longer taste and genius." — 
Ibid. p. 57. 

Here then Sir Joshua admits that it is a ques- 
tion whether the student is likely to be at all 
capable of such an acquisition as the higher ex- 
cellences of art, though he had said in the 
passage just quoted above, that it is within the 
reach of constant assiduity and of a disposition 
eagerly directed to the object of its pursuit to 
effect all that is usually considered as the result 
of natural powers. Is the theory which our 
author means to inculcate a mere delusion, a 
mere arbitrary assumption? At one moment, 
Sir Joshua attributes the hopelessness of the 
student to attain perfection to the discouraging 
influence of certain figurative and overstrained 
expressions, and in the next doubts his ca- 
pacity for such an acquisition under any cir- 
cumstances. Would he have him hope against 
hope, then? If he " examines his own mind 
and finds nothing there of that divine inspira- 
tion, with which he is told so many others have 
been favoured," but which he has never felt 
himself; if " he finds himself possessed of no 
other qualifications" for the highest efforts of 
genius and imagination " than what mere com- 



294 ON CERTAIN INCONSISTENCIES IN 

mon observation and a plain understanding can 
confer," he may as well desist at once from 
" ascending the brightest heaven of invention:" 
— if the very idea of the divinity of art deters 
instead of animating him, if the enthusiasm with 
which others speak of it damps the flame in his 
own breast, he had better not enter into a com- 
petition where he wants the first principle of 
success, the daring to aspire and the hope to 
excel. He may be assured he is not the man. 
Sir Joshua himself was not struck at first by the 
sight of the masterpieces of the great style of 
art, and he seems unconsciously to have adopted 
this theory to shew that he might still have suc- 
ceeded in it but for want of due application. 
His hypothesis goes to this — to make the com- 
mon run of his readers fancy they can do all 
that can be done by genius, and to make the 
man of genius believe he can only do what is to 
be done by mechanical rules and systematic in- 
dustry. This is not a very feasible scheme; nor 
is Sir Joshua sufficiently clear and explicit in 
his reasoning in support of it. 

In speaking of Carlo Maratti, he confesses the 
inefficiency of this doctrine in a very remarkable 
manner : — 

" Carlo Maratti succeeded better than those 
I have first named, and I think owes his su- 



SIR JOSHUA REYXOLDS's DISCOURSES. C 2 ( J5 

periority to the extension of his views : besides 
his master Andrea Sacchi, he imitated Raffaelle, 
Guido, and the Caraccis. It is true, there is 
nothing very captivating in Carlo Maratti ; but 
this proceeded from a want which cannot be 
completely supplied ; that is, want of strength 
of parts. In this certainly men are not equal; and 
a man can bring home wares only in proportion 
to the capital with which he goes to market. 
Carlo, by diligence, made the most of what he 
had : but there was undoubtedly a heaviness 
about him, which extended itself uniformly to 
his invention, expression, his drawing, colour- 
ing, and the general effect of his pictures. The 
truth is, he never equalled any of his patterns in 
any one thing, and he added little of his own." 
—Ibid. p. 172. 

Here then Reynolds, we see, fairly gives up 
the argument. Carlo, after all, was a heavy 
hand; nor could all his diligence and his 
making the most of what he had, make up for 
the want of " natural powers." Sir Joshua's good 
sense pointed out to him the truth in the indi- 
vidual instance, though he might be led astray 
by a vague general theory. Such however is the 
effect of a false principle that there is an evident 
bias in the artist's mind to make genius lean 
upon others for support, instead of trusting to 



296' ON CERTAIN INCONSISTENCIES IN 

itself and developing its own incommunicable 
resources. So in treating in the Twelfth Dis- 
course of the way in which great artists are 
formed, Sir Joshua reverts very nearly to his 
first position. 

" The daily food and nourishment of the 
mind of an Artist is found in the great works 
of his predecessors. There is no other way for 
him to become great himself. Serpens, nisi ser~ 
pentem comederit, non jit draco. Raffaelle, as 
appears from what has been said, had carefully 
studied the works of Masaccio, and indeed there 
was no other, if we except Michael Angelo 
(whom he likewise imitated) * so worthy of his 
attention : and though his manner was dry and 
hard, his compositions formal, and not enough 
diversified, according to the custom of Painters 
in that early period, yet his works possess that 
grandeur and simplicity which accompany, and 
even sometimes proceed from, regularity and 
hardness of manner. We must consider the 
barbarous state of the arts before his time, when 
skill in drawing was so little understood, that 
the best of the painters could not even fore- 
shorten the foot, but every figure appeared to 

* How careful is Sir Joshua, even in a parenthesis, to in- 
sinuate the obligations of this great genius to others, as if 
he would have been nothing without them I 



sir joshua reynolds's discourses. 297 

stand upon his toes ; and what served for dra- 
pery had, from the hardness and smallness of 
the folds, too much the appearance of cords 
clinging round the body. He first introduced 
large drapery, flowing in an easy and natural 
manner: indeed he appears to be the first who 
discovered the path that leads to every excel- 
lence to which the art afterwards arrived, and 
may therefore be justly considered as one of the 
Great Fathers of Modern Art. 

" Though I have been led on to a longer 
digression respecting this great painter than I 
intended, yet I cannot avoid mentioning another 
excellence which he possessed in a very eminent 
degree ; he was as much distinguished among 
his contemporaries for his diligence and in- 
dustry, as he was for the natural faculties of his 
mind. We are told that his whole attention was 
absorbed in the pursuit of his art, and that he 
acquired the name of Masaccio from his total 
disregard to his dress, his person, and all the 
common concerns of life. He is indeed a signal 
instance of what well-directed diligence will do in 
a short time : he lived but twenty-seven years ; 
yet in that short space carried the art so far 
beyond what it had before reached, that he ap- 
pears to stand alone as a model for his suc- 
cessors. Vasari gives a long catalogue of painters I 



298 ON CERTAIN INCONSISTENCIES IN 

and sculptors who formed their taste and learned 
their art, by studying his works ; among those, 
he names Michael Angelo, Lionardo da Vinci, 
Pietro Perugino, Raffaelle, Bartolomeo, Andrea 
del Sarto, II Rosso, and Pierino del Vaga." 
Vol. II. p. 95. 

Sir Joshua here again halts between two opi- 
nions. He tells us the names of the painters 
who formed themselves' upon Masaccio's style : 
he does not tell us on whom he formed him- 
self. At one time the natural faculties of his 
mind were as remarkable as his industry ; at 
another he was only a signal instance of what 
well-directed diligence will do in a short time. 
Then again " he appears to have been the first 
who discovered the path that leads to every ex- 
cellence to which the Art afterwards arrived," 
though he is introduced in an argument to shew 
that " the daily food and nourishment of the 
mind of the Artist must be found in the works 
of his predecessors." There is something surely 
very wavering and unsatisfactory in all this. 

Sir Joshua, in another part of his work, en- 
deavours to reconcile and prop up these contra- 
dictions by a paradoxical sophism which I think 
turns upon himself. He says, " I am on the 
contrary persuaded, that by imitation only" 
(by which he has just explained himself to mean 



sir joshua reynolds's discourses. 299 

the study of other masters) " variety and even 
originality of invention is produced. I will go 
further ; even genius, at least, what is so called, 
is the child of imitation. But as this appears 
to be contrary to the general opinion, I must 
explain my position before I enforce it. 

" Genius is supposed to be a power of pro- 
ducing excellencies, which are out of the reach 
of the rules of art ; a power w T hich no precepts 
can teach, and which no industry can acquire. 

" This opinion of the impossibility of ac- 
quiring those beauties, which stamp the work 
with the character of genius, supposes that it is 
something more fixed than in reality it is ; and 
that we always do and ever did agree in opinion, 
with respect to what should be considered as 
the characteristick of genius. But the truth 
is, that the degree of excellence which proclaims 
Genius is different in different times and dif- 
ferent places ; and what shows it to be so is, 
that mankind have often changed their opinion 
upon this matter. 

" When the Arts were in their infancy, the 
power of merely drawing the likeness of any 
object, was considered as one of its greatest 
efforts. The common people, ignorant of the 
principles of art, talk the same language even 
to this day. But when it was found that every 



300 ON CERTAIN INCONSISTENCIES IN 

man could be taught to do this, and a great 
deal more, merely by the observance of certain 
precepts ; the name of Genius then shifted its 
application, and was given only to him who 
added the peculiar character of the object he 
represented ; to him who had invention, ex- 
pression, grace, or dignity, in short, those qua- 
lities or excellencies, the power of producing 
which could not then be taught by any known 
and promulgated rules. 

" We are very sure that the beauty of form, 
the expression of the passions, the art of com- 
position, even the power of giving a general air 
of grandeur to a work, is at present very much 
under the dominion of rules. These excellencies 
were heretofore considered merely as the effects 
of genius ; and justly, if genius is not taken for 
inspiration, but as the effect of close observation 
and experience." — The Sixth Discourse, Vol. I. 
p. 153. 

Sir Joshua began with undertaking to shew 
that " genius was the child of the imitation of 
others, and now it turns out not to be inspiration 
indeed, but the effect of close observation and ex- 
perience. 5 ' The whole drift of this argument ap- 
pears to be contrary to what the writer intended, 
for the obvious inference is that the essence of 
genius consists entirely, both in kind and degree, 



sir joshua reynolds's discourses 501 

in the single circumstance of originality. The 
very same things are or are not genius, accord- 
ing as they proceed from invention or from 
mere imitation. In so far as a thing is original, 
as it has never been done before, it acquires 
and it deserves the appellation of genius : in so 
far as it is not original, and is borrowed from 
others or taught by rule, it is not, neither is it 
called, genius. This does not make much for 
the supposition that genius is a traditional and 
second-hand quality. Because, for example, a 
man without much genius can copy a picture 
of Michael Angelo's, does it follow that there 
was no genius in the original design, or that the 
inventor and the copyist are equal ? If indeed, 
as Sir Joshua labours to prove, mere imitation 
of existing models and attention to established 
rules could produce results exactly similar to 
those of natural powers, if the progress of art 
as a learned profession were a gradual but con- 
tinual accumulation of individual excellence, in- 
stead of being a sudden and almost miraculous 
start to the highest beauty and grandeur nearly 
at first, and a regular declension to mediocrity 
ever after, then indeed the distinction between 
genius and imitation would be little worth con- 
tending for ; the causes might be different, the 
effects would be the same, or rather skill to avail 



302 ON CERTAIN INCONSISTENCIES IN 

ourselves of external advantages would be of 
more importance and efficacy than the most 
powerful internal resources. But as the case 
stands, all the great works of art have been the 
offspring of individual genius, either projecting 
itself before the general advances of society or 
striking out a separate path for itself; all the 
rest is but labour in vain. For every purpose 
of emulation or instruction, we go back to the 
original inventors, not to those who imitated, 
and as it is falsely pretended, improved upon 
their models : or if those who followed have at 
any time attained as high a rank or surpassed 
their predecessors, it was not from borrowing 
their excellences, but by unfolding new and 
exquisite powers of their own, of which the 
moving principle lay in the individual mind, 
and not in the stimulus afforded by previous 
example and general knowledge. Great faults, 
it is true, may be avoided, but great excellences 
can never be attained in this way. If Sir 
Joshua's hypothesis of progressive refinement 
in art was any thing more than a verbal fallacy, 
why does he go back to Michael Angelo as the 
God of his idolatry ? Why does he find fault 
with Carlo Maratti for being heavy? Or why 
does he declare as explicitly as truly, that " the 
judgment, after it has been long passive, by 



sir joshua reynolds's discourses. 303 

degrees loses its power of becoming active when 
exertion is necessary?" — Once more to point 
out the fluctuation in Sir Joshua's notions on 
this subject of the advantages of natural genius 
and artificial study, he says, when recommend- 
ing the proper objects of ambition to the young 
artist — 

" My advice in a word is this : keep your 
principal attention fixed upon the higher excel- 
lencies. If you compass them, and compass 
nothing more, you are still in the first class. 
We may regret the innumerable beauties which 
you may want ; you may be very imperfect ; 
but still you are an imperfect artist of the 
highest order." Vol. I. p. 116. 

This is in the Fifth Discourse. In the Seventh 
our artist seems to waver, and fling a doubt on 
his former decision, whereby " it loses some 
colour." 

" Indeed perfection in an inferior style may 
be reasonably preferred to mediocrity in the 
highest walks of art. A landscape of Claude 
Lorraine may* be preferred to a history by 
Luca Giordano : but hence appears the neces- 

* If Sir Joshua had had an offer to exchange a Luca 
Giordano in his collection for a Claude Lorraine, he would 
not have hesitated long about the preference. 



304 ON CERTAIN INCONSISTENCIES IN 

sity of the connoisseur's knowing in what con- 
sists the excellency of each class, in order to 
judge how near it approaches to perfection." — 
Ibid. p. 217. 

As he advances, however, he grows bolder, 
and altogether discards his theory of judging 
of the artist by the class to which he belongs — 
" But we have the sanction of all mankind," he 
says, " in preferring genius in a lower rank of 
art, to feebleness and insipidity in the highest." 
This is in speaking of Gainsborough. The 
whole passage is excellent, and, I should think, 
conclusive against the general and factitious 
style of art on which he insists so much at other 
times. 

" On this ground, however unsafe, I will ven- 
ture to prophesy, that two of the last distin- 
guished Painters of that country, I mean Pom- 
peio Battoni, and Raffaelle Mengs, however 
great their names may at present sound in our 
ears*, will very soon fall into the rank of Im- 
periale, Sebastian Concha, Placido Constanza, 
Massuccio, and the rest of their immediate pre- 
decessors ; whose names, though equally re- 
nowned in their life-time, are now fallen into 
what is little short of total oblivion. I do not 

* Written in 1788. 



SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS S DISCOURSES. 305 

say that those painters were not superior to the 
artist I allude to*, and whose loss we lament, 
in a certain routine of practice, which, to the 
eyes of common observers, has the air of a 
learned composition, and bears a sort of super- 
ficial resemblance to the manner of the great 
men who went before them. I know this per- 
fectly well ; but I know likewise, that a man 
looking for real and lasting reputation must 
unlearn much of the common-place method so 
observable in the works of the artists whom I 
have named. For my own part, I confess, I 
take more interest in and am more captivated 
with the powerful impression of nature, which 
Gainsborough exhibited in his portraits and in 
his landscapes, and the interesting simplicity 
and elegance of his little ordinary beggar-chil- 
dren, than with any of the works of that School, 
since the time of Andrea Sacchi, or perhaps we 
may say, Carlo Maratti ; two painters who may 
truly be said to be Ultimi Romanorum. 

" I am well aware how much I lay myself 
open to the censure and ridicule of the Acade- 
mical professors of other nations, in preferring 
the humble attempts of Gainsborough to the 
works of those regular graduates in the great his- 
torical style. But we have the sanction of all 



* Gainsborough. 



x 



306 ON CERTAIN INCONSISTENCIES IN 

mankind in preferring genius in a lower rank of 
art to feebleness and insipidity in the highest." 
Vol. II. p. 152. 

Yet this excellent artist and critic had said 
but a few pages before when working upon his 
theory — " For this reason I shall beg leave to 
lay before you a few thoughts on the subject ; 
to throw out some hints that may lead your 
minds to an opinion (which I take to be the 
true one) that Painting is not only not to be 
considered as an imitation operating by decep- 
tion, but that it is, and ought to be, in many 
points of view and strictly speaking, no imita- 
tion at all of external nature. Perhaps it ought 
to be as far removed from the vulgar idea of 
imitation as the refined civilised state in which 
we live is removed from a gross state of nature ; 
and those who have not cultivated their ima- 
ginations, which the majority of mankind cer- 
tainly have not, may be said, in regard to arts, 
to continue in this state of nature. Such men 
will always prefer imitation" (the imitation of 
nature) " to that excellence which is addressed 
to another faculty that they do not possess ; but 
these are not the persons to whom a painter is 
to look, any more than a judge of morals and 
manners ought to refer controverted points upon 
those subjects to the opinions of people taken 



sir joshua reynolds's discourses. 307 

from the banks of the Ohio, or from New Hol- 
land."— Vol. II. p. 119. 

In opposition to the sentiment here expressed 
that " Painting is and ought to be, in many 
points of view and strictly speaking, no imita- 
tion at all of external nature/' it is emphatically 
said in another place — " Nature is and must 
be the fountain which alone is inexhaustible ; 
and from which all excellencies must originally 
flow."— Discourse VI. Vol. I. p. 162. 

I cannot undertake to reconcile so many 
contradictions, nor do I think it an easy task 
for the student to derive any simple or intel- 
ligible clue from these conflicting authorities 
and broken hints in the prosecution of his art. 
Sir Joshua appears to have imbibed from others 
(Burke or Johnson) a spurious metaphysical 
notion that art was to be preferred to nature, 
and learning to genius, with which his own 
good sense and practical observation were con- 
tinually at war, but from which he only eman- 
cipates himself for a moment to relapse into 
the same error again shortly after*. The con- 

* Sir Joshua himself wanted academic skill and patience 
in the details of his profession. From these defects he seems 
to have been alternately repelled by each theory and style of 
art, the simply natural and elaborately scientific, as it came 

x Q 



308 ON CERTAIN INCONSISTENCIES IN 

elusion of the Twelfth Discourse is, I think, 
however, a triumphant and unanswerable de- 
nunciation of his own favourite paradox on the 
objects and study of art. 

" Those artists," (he says with a strain of 
eloquent truth) " who have quitted the service 
of nature (whose service, when well understood, 
is perfect freedom) and have put themselves 
under the direction of I know not what capri- 
cious fantastical mistress, who fascinates and 
overpowers their whole mind, and from whose 
dominion there are no hopes of their being 
ever reclaimed (since they appear perfectly 
satisfied, and not at all conscious of their for- 
lorn situation) like the transformed followers 
of Comus, 

c Not once perceive their foul disfigurement ; 
But boast themselves more comely than before/ 

" Methinks, such men, who have found out 
so short a path, have no reason to complain of 
the shortness of life and the extent of art ; 
since life is so much longer than is wanted for 
their improvement, or is indeed necessary for 

before him ; and in his impatience of each, to have been be- 
trayed into a tissue of inconsistencies somewhat difficult to 
unravel. 



sir joshua reynolds's discourses. 309 

the accomplishment of their idea of perfection*, 
On the contrary, he who recurs to nature, at 
every recurrence renews his strength. The 
rules of art he is never likely to forget ; they 
are few and simple : but Nature is refined, 
subtle, and infinitely various, beyond the power 
and retention of memory ; it is necessary there- 
fore to have continual recourse to her. In this 
intercourse, there is no end of his improve- 
ment : the longer he lives, the nearer he ap- 
proaches to the true and perfect idea of Art." 
—Vol. II. p. 108. 

* He had been before speaking of Boucher, Director of 
the French Academy, who told him that " when he was 
young, studying his art, he found it necessary to use models, 
but that he had left them off for many years." 



ESSAY XIV. 
THE SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED. 



ESSAY XIV. 
THE SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED. 



The first inquiry which runs through Sir 
Joshua Reynolds's Discourses is whether the 
student ought to look at nature with his own 
eyes or with the eyes of others, and on the 
whole, he apparently inclines to the latter. 
The second question is what is to be under- 
stood by nature ; whether it is a general and 
abstract idea, or an aggregate of particulars ; 
and he strenuously maintains the former of 
these positions. Yet it is not easy always to 
determine how far or with what precise limit- 
ations he does so. 

The first germ of his speculations on this 
subject is to be found in two papers in the 
Idler. In the last paragraph of the second of 
these, he says, 

" If it has been proved that the Painter, by 
attending to the invariable and general ideas 
of nature, produces beauty, he must, by re- 
garding minute particularities and accidental 



314 ON CERTAIN INCONSISTENCIES IN 

discriminations, deviate from the universal rule, 
and pollute his canvas with deformity." — See 
Works, Vol. II. p. 242. 

In answer to this, I would say that deformity 
is not the being varied in the particulars, in 
which all things differ (for on this principle all 
nature, which is made up of individuals, would 
be a heap of deformity) but in violating general 
rules, in which they all or almost all agree. 
Thus there are no two noses in the world 
exactly alike, or without a great variety of 
subordinate parts, which may still be hand- 
some, but a face without any nose at all, or a 
nose (like that of a mask) without any parti- 
cularity in the details, would be a great de- 
formity in art or nature. Sir Joshua seems 
to have been led into his notions on this sub- 
ject either by an ambiguity of terms, or by 
taking only one view of nature. He supposes 
grandeur, or the general effect of the whole, to 
consist in leaving out the particular details, be- 
cause these details are sometimes found with- 
out any grandeur of effect, and he therefore 
conceives the two things to be irreconcileable 
and the alternatives of each other. This is 
very imperfect reasoning. If the mere leaving 
out the details constituted grandeur, any one 
could do this : the greatest dauber would at 



sir joshua reynolds's discourses. 315 

that rate be the greatest artist. A house or 
sign-painter might instantly enter the lists 
with Michael Angelo, and might look down on 
the little, dry, hard manner of Raphael. But 
grandeur depends on a distinct principle of its 
own, not on a negation of the parts ; and as it 
does not arise from their omission, so neither 
is it incompatible with their insertion or the 
highest finishing. In fact, an artist may give 
the minute particulars of any object one by 
one and with the utmost care, and totally 
neglect the proportions, arrangement and ge- 
neral masses, on which the effect of the whole 
more immediately depends ; or he may give 
the latter, viz. the proportions and arrange- 
ment of the larger parts and the general masses 
of light and shade, and leave all the minuter 
parts of which those parts are composed a mere 
blotch, one general smear, like the first crude 
and hasty getting in of the ground-work of a 
picture : he may do either of these, or he may 
combine both, that is, finish the parts, but put 
them in their right places, and keep them in 
due subordination to the general effect and 
massing of the whole. If the exclusion of the 
parts were necessary to the grandeur of the 
whole composition, if the more entire this ex- 
clusion, if the more like a tabula rasa, a vague, 



316 ON CERTAIN INCONSISTENCIES IN 

undefined, shadowy and abstracted represent- 
ation the picture was, the greater the grandeur, 
there could be no danger of pushing this prin- 
ciple too far, and going the full length of 
Sir Joshua's theory without any restrictions or 
mental reservations. But neither of these sup- 
positions is true. The greatest grandeur may 
co-exist with the most perfect, nay with a 
microscopic accuracy of detail, as we see it 
does often in nature : the greatest looseness 
and slovenliness of execution may be displayed 
without any grandeur at all either in the out- 
line or distribution of the masses of colour. 
To explain more particularly what I mean. I 
have seen and copied portraits by Titian, in 
which the eyebrows were marked with a num- 
ber of small strokes, like hair-lines (indeed, 
the hairs of which they were composed were in 
a great measure given) — but did this destroy 
the grandeur of expression, the truth of out- 
line, arising from the arrangement of these 
hair-lines in a given form ? The grandeur, the 
character, the expression remained, for the 
general form or arched and expanded outline 
remained, just as much as if it had been daubed 
in with a blacking-brush : the introduction of 
the internal parts and texture only added de- 
licacy and truth to the general and striking 



317 

effect of the whole. Surely a number of small 
dots or lines may be arranged into the form of a 
square or a circle indiscriminately ; the square 
or circle, that is, the larger figure, remains the 
same, whether the line of which it consists is 
broken or continuous ; as we may see in prints 
where the outlines, features, and masses re- 
main the same in all the varieties of mezzotinto, 
dotted and line engraving. If Titian in mark- 
ing the appearance of the hairs had deranged 
the general shape and contour of the eyebrows, 
he would have destroyed the look of nature ; 
but as he did not, but kept both in view T , 
he proportionably improved his copy of it. 
So, in what regards the masses of light and 
shade, the variety, the delicate transparency 
and broken transitions of the tints is not incon- 
sistent with the greatest breadth or boldest 
contrasts. If the light, for instance, is thrown 
strongly on one side of a face, and the other is 
cast into deep shade, let the individual and 
various parts of the surface be finished with 
the most scrupulous exactness both in the 
drawing and in the colours, provided nature is 
not exceeded, this will not nor cannot destroy 
the force and harmony of the composition. One 
side of the face will still have that great and 
leading distinction of being seen in shadow, and 



318 ON CERTAIN INCONSISTENCIES IN 

the other of being seen in the light, let the sub- 
ordinate differences be as many and as precise as 
they will. Suppose a panther is painted in the 
sun : will it be necessary to leave out the spots 
to produce breadth and the great style, or will 
not this be done more effectually by painting 
the spots of one side of his shaggy coat as they 
are seen in the light, and those of the other as 
they really appear in natural shadow ? The two 
masses are thus preserved completely, and no 
offence is done to truth and nature. Otherwise 
we resolve the distribution of light and shade 
into local colouring. The masses, the grandeur 
exist equally in external nature with the local 
differences of different colours. Yet Sir Joshua 
seems to argue that the grandeur, the effect of 
the whole object is confined to the general idea 
in the mind, and that all the littleness and in- 
dividuality is in nature. This is an essentially 
false view of the subject. This grandeur, this 
general effect is indeed always combined with 
the details, or what our theoretical reasoner 
would designate as littleness in nature : and so 
it ought to be in art, as far as art can follow 
nature with prudence and profit. What is the 
fault of Denner's style ? — It is, that he does not 
give this combination of properties : that he 
gives only one view of nature, that he abstracts 



sir joshua reynolds's discourses. 319 

the details, the finishing, the curiosities of na- 
tural appearances from the general result, truth 
and character of the whole, and in finishing 
every part with elaborate care, totally loses 
sight of the more important and striking appear- 
ance of the object as it presents itself to us in 
nature. He gives every part of a face ; but the 
shape, the expression, the light and shade of the 
whole is wrong, and as far as can be from what 
is natural. He gives an infinite variety of tints, 
but they are not the tints of the human face, 
nor are they subjected to any principle of light 
and shade. He is different from Rembrandt 
or Titian. The English school, formed on Sir 
Joshua's theory, give neither the finishing of 
the parts nor the effect of the whole, but an in- 
explicable dumb mass without distinction or 
meaning. They do not do as Denner did, and 
think that not to do as he did, is to do as Titian 
and Rembrandt did ; I do not know whether they 
would take it as a compliment to be supposed 
to imitate nature. Some few artists, it must be 
said, have " of late reformed this indifferently 
among us! Oh! let them reform it altogether!" 
I have no doubt they would if they could ; but 
I have some doubts whether they can or not. — 
Before I proceed to consider the question of 
beauty and grandeur as it relates to the selection 



320 ON CERTAIN INCONSISTENCIES IN 

of form, I will quote a few passages from Sir 
Joshua with reference to what has been said 
on the imitation of particular objects. In the 
Third Discourse he observes, " I will now add 
that nature herself is not to be too closely 
copied. ... A mere copier of nature can never 
produce any thing great ; can never raise and 
enlarge the conceptions, or "warm the heart of the 
spectator. The wish of the genuine painter 
must be more extensive : instead of endeavour- 
ing to amuse mankind with the minute neatness 
of his imitations, he must endeavour to improve 
them by the grandeur of his ideas ; instead of 
seeking praise by deceiving the superficial sense 
of the spectator, he must strive for fame by 
captivating the imagination." Vol. I. p. 53. 

From this passage it would surely seem that 
there was nothing in nature but minute neat- 
ness and superficial effect: nothing great in her 
style, for an imitator of it can produce nothing 
great ; nothing " to enlarge the conceptions or 
warm the heart of the spectator." 

" What word hath passed thy lips, Adam severe !" 

All that is truly grand or excellent is a figment 
of the imagination, a vapid creation out of 
nothing, a pure effect of overlooking and scorn- 
ing the minute neatness of natural objects. 



sir joshua reynolds's discourses. 3%l 

This will not do. Again, Sir Joshua lays it 
down without any qualification that 

" The whole beauty and grandeur of the art 
consists in being able to get above all singular 
forms, local customs, peculiarities, and details of 
every kind." Page 58. 

Yet at p. 82 we find him acknowledging a 
different opinion. 

" I am very ready to allow" (he says, in 
speaking of history-painting) " that some cir- 
cumstances of minuteness and particularity fre- 
quently tend to give an air of truth to a piece, 
and to interest the spectator in an extraordinary 
manner. Such circumstances therefore cannot 
wholly be rejected : but if there be any thing 
in the Art which requires peculiar nicety of 
discernment, it is the disposition of these minute 
circumstantial parts ; which according to the 
judgment employed in the choice, become so 
useful to truth or so injurious to grandeur." 
Page 82. 

That's true ; but the sweeping clause against 
" all particularities and details of every kind" 
is clearly got rid of. The undecided state of 
Sir Joshua's feelings on this subject of the in- 
compatibility between the whole and the details 
is strikingly manifested in two short passages 
which follow each other in the space of two 

Y 



322 ON CERTAIN INCONSISTENCIES IN 

pages. Speaking of some pictures of Paul 
Veronese and Rubens as distinguished by the 
dexterity and the unity of style displayed in 
them, he adds — 

"It is by this and this alone, that the me- 
chanical power is ennobled, and raised much 
above its natural rank. And it appears to me, 
that with propriety it acquires this character, as 
an instance of that superiority with which mind 
predominates over matter, by contracting into 
one whole what nature has made multifarious." 
Vol. II. p. 63. 

This would imply that the principle of unity 
and integrity is only in the mind, and that 
nature is a heap of disjointed, disconnected 
particulars, a chaos of points and atoms. In 
the very next page, the following sentence 
occurs — 

" As painting is an art, they" (the ignorant) 
" think they ought to be pleased in proportion 
as they see that art ostentatiously displayed ; 
they will from this supposition prefer neatness, 
high finishing, and gaudy colouring, to the truth, 
simplicity and unity of nature." 

Before, neatness and high finishing were sup- 
posed to belong exclusively to the littleness of 
nature, but here truth, simplicity and unity are 
her characteristics. Soon after, Sir Joshua says, 



sir joshua reynolds's discourses. 323 

" I should be sorry if what has been said should 
be understood to have any tendency to en- 
courage that carelessness which leaves work in 
an unfinished state. I commend nothing for 
the want of exactness ; I mean to point out 
that kind of exactness which is the best, and 
which is alone truly to be so esteemed." — Vol. 
II. p. 65. This Sir Joshua has already told us 
consists in getting above " all particularities 
and details of every kind." Once more we find 
it stated that 

" It is in vain to attend to the variation of 
tints, if in that attention the general hue of 
flesh is lost ; or to finish ever so minutely the 
parts, if the masses are not observed, or the 
whole not well put together." 

Nothing can be truer : but why always sup- 
pose the two things at variance with each other ? 

" Titian's manner was then new to the world, 
but that unshaken truth on which it is founded, 
has fixed it as a model to all succeeding painters ; 
and those who will examine into the artifice, will 
find it to consist in the power of generalising, 
and in the shortness and simplicity of the means 
employed." Page 51. 

Titian's real excellence consisted in the power 
of generalising and of individualising at the same 
time : if it were merely the former, it would be 

v £ 



3Q4t ON CERTAIN INCONSISTENCIES IN 

difficult to account for the error immediately 
after pointed out by Sir Joshua. He says in the 
very next paragraph: 

" Many artists, as Vasari likewise observes, 
have ignorantly imagined they are imitating the 
manner of Titian, when they leave their colours 
rough, and neglect the detail : but not possess- 
ing the principles on which he wrought, they 
have produced what he calls goffe pitture, absurd, 
foolish pictures." — Ibid. p. 54. 

Many artists have also imagined they were 
following the directions of Sir Joshua when 
they did the same thing, that is, neglected the 
detail, and produced the same results, vapid 
generalities, absurd, foolish pictures. 

I will only give two short passages more, and 
have done with this part of the subject. I am 
anxious to confront Sir Joshua with his own 
authority. 

" The advantage of this method of consider- 
ing objects (as a whole) is what I wish now 
more particularly to enforce. At the same time 
I do not forget, that a painter must have the 
power of contracting as well as dilating his 
sight ; because he that does not at all express 
particulars, expresses nothing ; yet it is certain 
that a nice discrimination of minute circum- 
stances and a punctilious delineation of them, 



sir joshua reynolds's discourses. 325 

whatever excellence it may have (and I do not 
mean to detract from it), never did confer on 
the artist the character of Genius." Vol. II. 
p. 44. 

At page 53, we iind the following words. 

" Whether it is the human figure, an animal, 
or even inanimate objects, there is nothing, 
however unpromising in appearance, but may 
be raised into dignity, convey sentiment, and 
produce emotion, in the hands of a Painter of 
genius. What was said of Virgil, that he threw 
even the dung about the ground with an air of 
dignity, may be applied to Titian ; whatever he 
touched, however naturally mean, and habitually 
familiar, by a kind of magic he invested with 
grandeur and importance." — No, not by magic, 
but by seeking and finding in individual nature, 
and combined with details of every kind, that 
grace and grandeur and unity of effect which 
Sir Joshua supposes to be a mere creation of 
the artist's brain ! Titian's practice was, I con- 
ceive, to give general appearances with in- 
dividual forms and circumstances : Sir Joshua's 
theory goes too often, and in its prevailing bias, 
to separate the two things as inconsistent with 
each other, and thereby to destroy or bring 
into question that union of striking effect with 
accuracy of resemblance in which the essence 



326 ON CERTAIN INCONSISTENCIES IN 

of sound art (as far as relates to imitation) 
consists. 

Farther, as Sir Joshua is inclined to merge 
the details of individual objects in general effect, 
so he is resolved to reduce all beauty or grandeur 
in natural objects to a central form or abstract 
idea of a certain class, so as to exclude all 
peculiarities or deviations from this ideal stand- 
ard as unfit subjects for the artist's pencil, and 
as polluting his canvas with deformity. As 
the former principle went to destroy all exact- 
ness and solidity in particular things, this goes 
to confound all variety, distinctness, and cha- 
racteristic force in the broader scale of nature. 
There is a principle of conformity in nature or 
of something in common between a number of 
individuals of the same class, but there is also 
a principle of contrast, of discrimination and 
identity, which is equally essential in the system 
of the universe and in the structure of our ideas 
both of art and nature. Sir Joshua would 
hardly neutralise the tints of the rainbow to 
produce a dingy grey, as a medium or central 
colour : why then should he neutralise all fea- 
tures, forms, &c.to produce an insipid monotony? 
He does not indeed consider his theory of beauty 
as applicable to colour, which he well under- 
stood, but insists upon and literally enforces it 



sir joshua reynolds's discourses. 327 

as to form and ideal conceptions, of which he 
knew comparatively little, and where his au- 
thority is more questionable. I will not in this 
place undertake to shew that his theory of a 
middle form (as the standard of taste and beauty) 
is not true of the outline of the human face and 
figure or other organic bodies, though I think 
that even there it is only one principle or con- 
dition of beauty ; but I do say that it has little 
or nothing to do with those other capital parts 
of painting, colour, character, expression, and 
grandeur of conception. Sir Joshua himself 
contends that " beauty in creatures of the same 
species is the medium or centre of all its various 
forms ;" and he maintains that grandeur is the 
same abstraction of the species in the individual. 
Therefore beauty and grandeur must be the 
same thing, which they are not ; so that this 
definition must be faulty. Grandeur I should 
suppose to imply something that elevates and 
expands the mind, which is chiefly power or 
magnitude. Beauty is that which soothes and 
melts it, and its source I apprehend is a certain 
harmony, softness, and gradation of form, within 
the limits of our customary associations, no 
doubt, or of what we expect of certain species, 
but not independent of every other considera- 
tion. Our critic himself confesses of Michael 



328 ON CERTAIN INCONSISTENCIES IN 

Angelo, whom he regards as the pattern of the 
great or sublime style, that " his people are a 
superior order of beings ; there is nothing about 
them, nothing in the air of their actions or their 
attitudes, or the style or cast of their limbs or 
features, that reminds us of their belonging to 
our own species. Rafaelle's imagination is not 
so elevated : his figures are not so much dis- 
joined from our own diminutive race of beings, 
though his ideas are chaste, noble, and of great 
conformity to their subjects. Michael Angelo's 
works have a strong, peculiar, and marked cha- 
racter : they seem to proceed from his own mind 
entirely, and that mind so rich and abundant, 
that he never needed or seemed to disdain to 
look abroad for foreign help. Rafaelle's ma- 
terials are generally borrowed, though the noble 
structure is his own." Fifth Discourse. How 
does all this accord with the same writer's 
favourite theory that all beauty, all grandeur, 
and all excellence consist in an approximation 
to that central form or habitual idea of me- 
diocrity, from which every deviation is so much 
deformity and littleness? Michael Angelo's 
figures are raised above our diminutive race of 
beings, yet they are confessedly the standard 
of sublimity in what regards the human form. 
Grandeur then admits of an exaggeration of 



sir joshua reynolds's discourses. 329 

our habitual impressions; and " the strong, 
marked, and peculiar character which Michael 
Angelo has at the same time given to his works" 
does not take away from it. This is fact against 
argument. I would take Sir Joshua's word for 
the goodness of a picture, and for its distinguish- 
ing properties, sooner than I would for an ab- 
stract metaphysical theory. Our artist also 
speaks continually of high and low subjects. 
There can be no distinction of this kind upon 
his principle, that the standard of taste is the 
adhering to the central form of each species, 
and that every species is in itself equally beauti- 
ful. The painter of flowers, of shells, or of any 
thing else, is equally elevated with Raphael or 
Michael, if he adheres to the generic or esta- 
blished form of what he paints : the rest, ac- 
cording to this definition, is a matter of in differ- 
ence. There must therefore be something be- 
sides the central or customary form to account 
for the difference of dignity, for the high and 
low style in nature or in art. Michael Angelo's 
figures, we are told, are more than ordinarily 
grand: why, by the same rule, may not Ra- 
phael's be more than ordinarily beautiful, have 
more than ordinary softness, symmetry, and 
grace ?— Character and expression are still less 
included in the present theory. All character 



330 ON CERTAIN INCONSISTENCIES IN 

is a departure from the common-place form ; 
and Sir Joshua makes no scruple to declare that 
expression destroys beauty. Thus he says, 

" If you mean to preserve the most perfect 
beauty in its most perfect state, you cannot ex- 
press the passions, all of which produce distor- 
tion and deformity, more or less, in the most 
beautiful faces."— Vol. I. p. 118. 

He goes on — " Guido, from want of choice 
in adapting his subject to his ideas and his 
powers, or from attempting to preserve beauty 
where it could not be preserved, has in this 
respect succeeded very ill. His figures are 
often engaged in subjects that required great 
expression : yet his Judith and Holofernes, the 
daughter of Herodias with the Baptist's head, 
the Andromeda, and some even of the Mothers 
of the Innocents, have little more expression 
than his Venus attired by the Graces." — Ibid. 

What a censure is this passed upon Guido, 
and what a condemnation of his own theory 
which would reduce and level all that is truly 
great and praiseworthy in art to this insipid, 
tasteless standard, by setting aside as illegiti- 
mate all that does not come within the middle, 
central form ! Yet Sir Joshua judges of Ho- 
garth as he deviates from this standard, not as 
he excels in individual character, which he says 



sir joshua reynolds's discourses. 331 

is only good or tolerable as it partakes of ge- 
neral nature ; and he might accuse Michael 
Angelo and Raphael, the one for his grandeur 
of style, the other for his expression ; for 
neither are what he sets up as the goal of per- 
fection. — I will just stop to remark here, that 
Sir Joshua has committed himself very strangely 
in speaking of the character and expression to 
be found in the Greek statues. He says in one 
place — 

" I cannot quit the Apollo, without making 
one observation on the character of this figure. 
He is supposed to have just discharged his 
arrow at the Python ; and by the head retreat- 
ing a little towards the right shoulder, he ap- 
pears attentive to its effect. What I would re- 
mark, is the difference of this attention from 
that of the Discobolus, who is engaged in the 
same purpose, watching the effect of his Discus. 
The graceful, negligent, though animated air 
of the one, and the vulgar eagerness of the 
other, furnish an instance of the judgment of 
the ancient Sculptors in their nice discrimina- 
tion of character. They are both equally true 
to nature, and equally admirable." — Vol. II. 
p. 21. 

After a few observations on the limited 
means of the art of Sculpture, and the inatten- 



332 ON CERTAIN INCONSISTENCIES IN 

tion of the ancients to almost every thing but 
form, we meet with the following passage : — 

" Those who think Sculpture can express 
more than we have allowed may ask, by what 
means we discover, at the first glance, the 
character that is represented in a Bust, a 
Cameo, or Intaglio ? I suspect it will be found, 
on close examination, by him who is resolved 
not to see more than he really does see, that 
the figures are distinguished by their insignia 
more than by any variety of form or beauty. 
Take from Apollo his Lyre, from Bacchus his 
Thyrsus and Vine-leaves, and Meleager the 
Boar's Head, and there will remain little or no 
difference in their characters. In a Juno, 
Minerva, or Flora, the idea of the artist seems 
to have gone no further than representing per- 
fect beauty, and afterwards adding the proper 
attributes, with a total indifference to which 
they gave them." 

[What then becomes of that " nice discrimi- 
nation of character" for which our author has 
just before celebrated them ?] 

" Thus John De Bologna, after he had 
finished a group of a young man holding up a 
young woman in his arms, with an old man at 
his feet, called his friends together, to tell him 
what name he should give it, and it was agreed 



sir joshua reynolds's discourses. 338 

to call it The Rape of the Sabines ; and this is 
the celebrated group which now stands before 
the old Palace at Florence. The figures have 
the same general expression which is to be 
found in most of the antique Sculpture,; and 
yet it would be no wonder, if future critics 
should find out delicacy of expression which 
was never intended ; and go so far as to see, in 
the old man's countenance, the exact relation 
which he bore to the woman who appears to be 
taken from him." — Ibid. p. 25. 

So it is that Sir Joshua's theory seems to rest 
on an inclined plane, and is always glad of an 
excuse to slide, from the severity of truth and 
nature, into the milder and more equable regions 
of insipidity and inanity ! I am sorry to say so, 
but so it appears to me. 

I confess, it strikes me as a self-evident truth 
that variety or contrast is as essential a prin- 
ciple in art and nature as uniformity, and as 
necessary to make up the harmony of the uni- 
verse and the contentment of the mind. Who 
would destroy the shifting effects of light and 
shade, the sharp, lively opposition of colours in 
the same or in different objects, the streaks in a 
flower, the stains in a piece of marble, to re- 
duce all to the same neutral, dead colouring, 
the same middle tint ? Yet it is on this prin- 



334 ON CERTAIN INCONSISTENCIES IN 

ciple that Sir Joshua would get rid of all 
variety, character, expression, and picturesque 
effect in forms, or at least measure the worth 
or the spuriousness of all these according to 
their reference to or departure from a given 
or average standard. Surely, nature is more 
liberal, art is wider than Sir Joshua's theory. 
Allow (for the sake of argument) that all forms 
are in themselves indifferent, and that beauty 
or the sense of pleasure in forms can therefore 
only arise from customary association, or from 
that middle impression to which they all tend : 
yet this cannot by the same rule apply to other 
things. Suppose there is no capacity in form 
to affect the mind except from its corresponding 
to previous expectation, the same thing cannot 
be said of the idea of power or grandeur. No 
one can say that the idea of power does not 
affect the mind with the sense of awe and 
sublimity. That is, power and weakness, gran- 
deur and littleness, are not indifferent things, 
the perfection of which consists in a medium 
between both. Again, expression is not a 
thing indifferent in itself, which derives its 
value or its interest solely from its conformity 
to a neutral standard. Who would neutralise 
the expression of pleasure and pain ? Or say 
that the passions of the human mind, pity, 



sir joshua reynolds's discourses. 335 

love, joy, sorrow, &c. are only interesting to 
the imagination and worth the attention of the 
artist, as he can reduce them to an equivocal state 
which is neither pleasant nor painful, neither 
one thing nor the other ? Or who would stop 
short of the utmost refinement, precision, and 
force in the delineation of each? Ideal expres- 
sion is not neutral expression, but extreme ex- 
pression. Again, character is a thing of pecu- 
liarity, of striking contrast, of distinction, and 
not of uniformity. It is necessarily opposed to 
Sir Joshua's exclusive theory, and yet it is 
surely a curious and interesting field of specu- 
lation for the human mind. Lively, spirited 
discrimination of character is one source of 
gratification to the lover of nature and art, 
which it could not be, if all truth and excel- 
lence consisted in rejecting individual traits. 
Ideal character is not common-place, but con- 
sistent character marked throughout, which 
may take place in history or portrait. Historical 
truth in a picture is the putting the different 
features of the face or muscles of the body into 
consistent action. The picturesque altogether 
depends on particular points or qualities of an 
object, projecting as it were beyond the middle 
line of beauty, and catching the eye of the spec- 
tator. It was less, however, my intention to 



336 ON CERTAIN INCONSISTENCIES IN 

hazard any speculations of my own, than to 
confirm the common-sense feelings on the sub- 
ject by Sir Joshua's own admissions in different 
places. In the Tenth Discourse, speaking of 
some objections to the Apollo, he has these re- 
markable words — 

" In regard to the last objection (viz. that 
the lower half of the figure is longer than just 
proportion allows) it must be remembered, that 
Apollo is here in the exertion of one of his 
peculiar powers, which is swiftness ; he has 
therefore that proportion which is best adapted 
to that character. This is no more incorrect- 
ness, than when there is given to an Hercules 
an extraordinary swelling and strength of 
muscles."— Vol. II. p. 20. 

Strength and activity then do not depend on 
the middle form ; and the middle form is to be 
sacrificed to the representation of these posi- 
tive qualities. Character is thus allowed not 
only to be an integrant part of the antique and 
classical style of art, but even to take pre- 
cedence of and set aside the abstract idea of 
beauty. Little more would be required to jus- 
tify Hogarth in his Gothic resolution, that if he 
were to make a figure of Charon, he would 
give him bandy legs, because watermen are 
generally bandy-legged. It is very well to talk 



sir joshua reynolds's discourses. 337 

of the abstract idea of a man or of a God, but 
if you come to any thing like an intelligible pro- 
position, you must either individualise and de- 
fine, or destroy the very idea you contemplate. 
Sir Joshua goes into this question at consider- 
able length in the Third Discourse. 

" To the principle I have laid down, that 
the idea of beauty in each species of beings is 
an invariable one, it maybe objected," he says, 
" that in every particular species there are 
various central forms, which are separate and 
distinct from each other, and yet are undeni- 
ably beautiful ; that in the human figure, for 
instance, the beauty of Hercules is one, of the 
Gladiator another, of the Apollo another, which 
makes so many different ideas of beauty. It 
is true, indeed, that these figures are each per- 
fect in their kind, though of different characters 
and proportions ; but still none of them is the 
representation of an individual, but of a class. 
And as there is one general form, which, as I 
have said, belongs to the human kind at large, 
so in each of these classes there is one common 
idea which is the abstract of the various indi- 
vidual forms belonging to that class. Thus, 
though the forms of childhood and age differ 
exceedingly, there is a common form in child- 
hood, and a common form in age, which is the 

z 



338 ON CERTAIN INCONSISTENCIES IN 

more perfect as it is remote from all pecu- 
liarities. But I must add further, that though 
the most perfect forms of each of the general 
divisions of the human figure are ideal, and 
superior to any individual form of that class ; 
yet the highest perfection of the human figure 
is not to be found in any of them. It is not in 
the Hercules, nor in the Gladiator, nor in the 
Apollo ; but in that form which is taken from 
all, and which partakes equally of the activity 
of the Gladiator, of the delicacy of the Apollo, 
and of the muscular strength of the Hercules. 
For perfect beauty in any species must combine 
all the characters which are beautiful in that 
species. It cannot consist in any one to the 
exclusion of the rest : no one, therefore, must 
be predominant, that no one may be deficient." 
—Vol. II. p. 64. 

Sir Joshua here supposes the distinctions of 
classes and character to be necessarily com- 
bined with the general leading idea of a middle 
form. This middle form is not to confound 
age, sex, circumstance, under one sweeping 
abstraction: but we must limit the general 
idea by certain specific differences and charac- 
teristic marks, belonging to the several sub- 
ordinate divisions and ramifications of each 
class. This is enough to shew that there is a 



sir joshua reynolds's discourses. 339 

principle of individuality as well as of abstrac- 
tion inseparable from works of art as well as 
nature. We are to keep the human form distinct 
from that of other living beings, that of men 
from that of women ; we are to distinguish be- 
tween age and infancy, between thoughtfulness 
and gaiety, between strength and softness. 
Where is this to stop ? But Sir Joshua turns 
round upon himself in this very passage, and 
says, " No : we are to unite the strength of the 
Hercules with the delicacy of the Apollo; for per- 
fect beauty in any species must combine all the 
characters which are beautiful in that species." 
Now if these different characters are beautiful 
in themselves, why not give them for their own 
sakes and in their most striking appearances, 
instead of qualifying and softening them down 
in a neutral form ; which must produce a com- 
promise, not a union of different excellences. 
If all excess of beauty, if all character is de- 
formity, then we must try to lose it as fast as 
possible in other qualities. But if strength is 
an excellence, if activity is an excellence, if 
delicacy is an excellence, then the perfection, 
i. e. the highest degree of each of these qualities 
cannot be attained but by remaining satisfied 
with a less degree of the rest. But let us hear 

/ l 2 



340 ON CERTAIN INCONSISTENCIES IN 

what Sir Joshua himself advances on this sub- 
ject in another part of the Discourses. 

" Some excellencies bear to be united, and 
are improved by union: others are of a dis- 
cordant nature : and the attempt to unite them 
only produces a harsh jarring of incongruent 
principles. The attempt to unite contrary ex- 
cellencies (of form, for instance*) in a single 
figure, can never escape degenerating into the 
monstrous but by sinking into the insipid; by 
taking away its marked character, and weakening 
its expression. 

" Obvious as these remarks appear, there are 
many writers on our art, who not being of the 
profession, and consequently not knowing what 
can or cannot be done, have been very liberal 
of absurd praises in their description of fa- 
vourite works. They always find in them what 
they are resolved to find. They praise excel- 
lencies that can hardly exist together; and 
above all things are fond of describing with 
great exactness the expression of a mixed pas- 
sion, which more particularly appears to me 
out of the reach of our artt." 

* These are Sir Joshua's words. 

t I do not know that : but I do not think the two pas- 
sions could be expressed by expressing neither or something 
between both. 



sir joshua reynolds's discourses. 341 

"Such are many disquisitions which I have read 
on some of the Cartoons and other pictures of 
Raffaelle, where the critics have described their 
own imaginations ; or indeed where the excel- 
lent master himself may have attempted this 
expression of passions above the powers of the 
art; and has, therefore, by an indistinct and 
imperfect marking, left room for every ima- 
gination with equal probability to find a passion 
of his own. What has been, and what can be 
done in the art, is sufficiently difficult: we need 
not be mortified or discouraged at not being 
able to execute the conceptions of a romantic 
imagination. Art has its boundaries, though 
imagination has none. We can easily, like the 
ancients, suppose a Jupiter to be possessed of 
all those powers and perfections which the sub- 
ordinate Deities were endowed with separately. 
Yet when they employed their art to represent 
him, they confined his character to majesty 
alone. Pliny, therefore, though we are under 
great obligations to him for the information he 
has given us in relation to the works of the 
ancient artists, is very frequently wrong when 
he speaks of them, which he does very often, in 
the style of many of our modern connoisseurs. 
He observes that in a statue of Paris, by Eu- 
phranor, you might discover at the same time 



342 ON CERTAIN INCONSISTENCIES IN 

three different characters ; the dignity of a 
Judge of the Goddesses, the Lover of Helen, 
and the Conqueror of Achilles. A statue in 
which you endeavour to unite stately dignity, 
youthful elegance, and stern valour, must surely 
possess none of these to any eminent degree. 

" From hence it appears, that there is much 
difficulty as well as danger in an endeavour to 
concentrate in a single subject those various 
powers, which, rising from various points, na- 
turally move in different directions." — Vol. I. 
p. 120. 

What real clue to the art or sound principles 
of judging the student can derive from these 
contradictory statements, or in what manner it 
is possible to reconcile them one to the other, 
I confess I am at a loss to discover. As it ap- 
pears to me, all the varieties of nature in the in- 
finite number of its qualities, combinations, cha- 
racters, expressions, incidents, &c. rise from 
distinct points or centres and must move in 
distinct directions, as the forms of different 
species are to be referred to a separate standard. 
It is the object of art to bring them out in all 
their force, clearness, and precision, and not to 
blend them into a vague, vapid, nondescript 
ideal conception, which pretends to unite, but in 
reality destroys. Sir Joshua's theory limits na- 



sir joshua reynolds's discourses. 343 

tare and paralyses art. According to him, the 
middle form or the average of our various im- 
pressions is the source from which all beauty, 
pleasure, interest, imagination springs. I con- 
tend on the contrary that this very variety is good 
in itself, nor do I agree with him that the whole 
of nature as it exists in fact is stark naught, and 
that there is nothing worthy of the contempla- 
tion of a wise man but that ideal perfection which 
never existed in the world nor even on canvas. 
There is something fastidious and sickly in Sir 
Joshua's system. His code of taste consists too 
much of negations, and not enough of positive, 
prominent qualities. It accounts for nothing 
but the beauty of the common Antique, and 
hardly for that. The merit of Hogarth, I grant, 
is different from that of the Greek statues ; but 
I deny that Hogarth is to be measured by this 
standard or by Sir Joshua's middle forms : he 
has powers of instruction and amusement that 
" rising from a different point, naturally move 
in a different direction," and completely attain 
their end. It would be just as reasonable to 
condemn a comedy for not having the pathos of 
a tragedy or the stateliness of an epic poem. If 
Sir Joshua Reynolds's theory were true, Dr. 
Johnson's Irene would be a better tragedy than 
any of Shakespear's. 



344 ON CERTAIN INCONSISTENCIES IN 

The reasoning of the Discourses is, I think 
then, deficient in the following particulars. 

1. It seems to imply that general effect in a 
picture is produced by leaving out the details, 
whereas the largest masses and the grandest 
outline are consistent with the utmost delicacy 
of finishing in the parts. 

2. It makes no distinction between beauty 
and grandeur, but refers both to an ideal or 
middle form, as the centre of the various forms 
of the species, and yet inconsistently attributes 
the grandeur of Michael Angejo's style to the 
superhuman appearance of his prophets and 
apostles. 

3. It does not at any time make mention of 
power or magnitude in an object as a distinct 
source of the sublime (though this is acknow- 
ledged unintentionally in the case of Michael 
Angelo, &c.) nor of softness or symmetry of 
form as a distinct source of beauty, independ- 
ently of, though still in connection with another 
source arising from what we are accustomed to 
expect from each individual species. 

4. Sir Joshua's theory does not leave room 
for character, but rejects it as an anomaly, 

5. It does not point out the source of ex- 
pression, but considers it as hostile to beauty; 
and yet, lastly, he allows that the middle form, 



sir joshua Reynolds's discourses. 345 

carried to the utmost theoretical extent, neither 
defined by character, nor impregnated by passion, 
would produce nothing but vague, insipid, un- 
meaning generality. 

In a word, I cannot think that the theory 
here laid down is clear and satisfactory, that it 
is consistent with itself, that it accounts for the 
various excellences of art from a few simple 
principles, or that the method which Sir Joshua 
has pursued in treating the subject is, as he 
himself expresses it, " a plain and honest method." 
It is, I fear, more calculated to baffle and per- 
plex the student in his progress, than to give 
him clear lights as to the object he should have 
in view, or to furnish him with strong motives 
of emulation to attain it. 



ESSAY XV. 
ON PARADOX AND COMMON-PLACE. 



ESSAY XV. 

ON PARADOX AND COMMON-PLACE, 



I have been sometimes accused of a fondness 
for paradoxes, but I cannot in my own mind 
plead guilty to the charge. I do not indeed 
swear by an opinion, because it is old: but 
neither do I fall in love with every extravagance 
at first sight, because it is new. I conceive that 
a thing may have been repeated a thousand 
times, without being a bit more reasonable than 
it was the first time : and I also conceive that 
an argument or an observation may be very 
just, though it may so happen that it was never 
stated before. But I do not take it for granted 
that every prejudice is ill-founded; nor that 
every paradox is self-evident, merely because it 
contradicts the vulgar opinion. Sheridan once 
said of some speech in his acute, sarcastic w r ay, 
that " it contained a great deal both of what 
was new and what was true : but that unfor- 
tunately what was new was not true, and what 
was true was not new." This appears to me 



350 ON PARADOX AND COMMON-PLACE. 

to express the whole sense of the question. I 
do not see much use in dwelling on a common- 
place, however fashionable or well-established : 
nor am I very ambitious of starting the most 
specious novelty, unless I imagine I have reason 
on my side. Originality implies independence 
of opinion ; but differs as widely from mere 
singularity as from the tritest truism. It con- 
sists in seeing and thinking for one's-self: 
whereas singularity is only the affectation of 
saying something to contradict other people, 
without having any real opinion of one's own 
upon the matter. Mr. Burke was an original, 
though an extravagant writer: Mr. Windham 
was a regular manufacturer of paradoxes. 

The greatest number of minds seem utterly 
incapable of fixing on any conclusion, except 
from the pressure of custom and authority: 
opposed to these, there is another class less nu- 
merous but pretty formidable, who in all their 
opinions are equally under the influence of 
novelty and restless vanity. The prejudices of 
the one are counter-balanced by the paradoxes 
of the other ; and folly, " putting in one scale 
a weight of ignorance, in that of pride," might 
be said to " smile delighted with the eternal 
poise." A sincere and manly spirit of inquiry 
is neither blinded by example nor dazzled by 



ON PARADOX AND COMMON-PLACE. 351 

sudden flashes of light. Nature is always the 
same, the store-house of lasting truth, and teem- 
ing with inexhaustible variety; and he who 
looks at her with steady and well-practised eyes, 
will find enough to employ all his sagacity, 
whether it has or has not been seen by others 
before him. Strange as it may seem, to learn 
what any object is, the true philosopher looks at 
the object itself, instead of turning to others to 
know what they think or say or have heard of 
it, or instead of consulting the dictates of his 
vanity, petulance, and ingenuity to see what 
can be said against their opinion, and to prove 
himself wiser than all the rest of the world. 
For want of this, the real powers and resources 
of the mind are lost and dissipated in a conflict 
of opinions and passions, of obstinacy against 
levity, of bigotry against self-conceit, of noto- 
rious abuses against rash innovations, of dull, 
plodding, old-fashioned stupidity against new- 
fangled folly, of worldly interest against head- 
strong egotism, of the incorrigible prejudices of 
the old and the unmanageable humours of the 
young ; while truth lies in the middle, and is 
overlooked by both parties. Or as Luther 
complained long ago, " human reason is like 
a drunken man on horse-back : set it up on 
one side, and it tumbles over on the other." — 



352 ON PARADOX AND COMMON-PLACE. 

With one sort, example, authority, fashion, 
ease, interest, rule all : with the other, singu- 
larity, the love of distinction, mere whim, the 
throwing off all restraint and shewing an heroic 
disregard of consequences, an impatient and 
unsettled turn of mind, the want of sudden 
and strong excitement, of some new play-thing 
for the imagination, are equally " lords of the 
ascendant," and are at every step getting the 
start of reason, truth, nature, common sense and 
feeling. With one party, whatever is, is right : 
with their antagonists, whatever is, is wrong. 
These swallow every antiquated absurdity: 
those catch at every new, unfledged project — 
and are alike enchanted with the velocipedes 
or the French Revolution. One set, wrapped up 
in impenetrable forms and technical traditions, 
are deaf to every thing that has not been dinned 
in their ears, and in those of their forefathers, 
from time immemorial : their hearing is thick 
with the same old saws, the same unmeaning 
form of words, everlastingly repeated: the 
others pique themselves on a jargon of their 
own, a Babylonish dialect, crude, unconcocted, 
harsh, discordant, to which it is impossible for 
any one else to attach either meaning or respect. 
These last turn away at the mention of all 
usages, creeds, institutions of more than a day's 



ON PARADOX AND COMMON-PLACE. 353 

standing as a mass of bigotry, superstition, and 
barbarous ignorance, whose leaden touch would 
petrify and benumb their quick, mercurial, 
" apprehensive, forgetive" faculties. The opi- 
nion of to-day supersedes that of yesterday : 
that of to-morrow supersedes, by anticipation, 
that of to-day. The wisdom of the ancients, 
the doctrines of the learned, the laws of nations, 
the common sentiments of morality, are to them 
like a bundle of old almanacs. As the modern 
politician always asks for this day's paper, the 
modern sciolist always inquires after the latest 
paradox. With him instinct is a dotard, nature 
a changeling, and common sense a discarded 
bye-word. As with the man of the world, what 
every body says must be true, the citizen of the 
world has a quite different notion of the matter. 
With the one the majority, " the powers that 
be," have always been in the right in all ages 
and places, though they have been cutting one 
another's throats and turning the world upside 
down with their quarrels and disputes from the 
beginning of time : with the other, what any 
two people have ever agreed in, is an error on 
the face of it. The credulous bigot shudders 
at the idea of altering any thing in " time- 
hallowed" institutions ; and under this cant- 
phrase can bring himself to tolerate any knavery, 

A A 



354) ON PARADOX AND COMMON-PLACE. 

or any folly, the Inquisition, Holy Oil, the 
Right Divine, &c. the more refined sceptic will 
laugh in your face at the idea of retaining any 
thing which has the damning stamp of cus- 
tom upon it, and is for abating all former pre- 
cedents, " all trivial, fond records," the whole 
frame and fabric of society as a nuisance in the 
lump. Is not this a pair of wiseacres well- 
matched ? The one stickles through thick and 
thin for his own religion and government : the 
other scouts all religions and all governments 
with a smile of ineffable disdain. The one will 
not move for any consideration out of the broad 
and beaten path : the other is continually turn- 
ing off at right angles, and losing himself in the 
labyrinths of his own ignorance and presump- 
tion. The one will not go along with any 
party; the other always joins the strongest 
side. The one will not conform to any common 
practice; the other will subscribe to any thriving 
system. The one is the slave of habit, the other 
is the sport of caprice. The first is like a man 
obstinately bed-rid: the last is troubled with 
St. Vitus's dance. He cannot stand still, he 
cannot rest upon any conclusion. " He never 
is — but always to be right." 

The author of the Prometheus Unbound (to 
take an individual instance of the last character) 






ON PARADOX AND COMMON-PLACE. 35.5 

has a fire in his eye, a fever in his blood, a 
maggot in his brain, a hectic flutter in his 
speech, which mark out the philosophic fanatic. 
He is sanguine-complexioned, and shrill-voiced. 
As is often observable in the case of religious 
enthusiasts, there is a slenderness of constitu- 
tional stamina, which renders the flesh no match 
for the spirit. His bending, flexible form appears 
to take no strong hold of things, does not grapple 
with the world about him, but slides from it 
like a river — 

" And in its liquid texture mortal wound 
Receives no more than can the fluid air." 

The shock of accident, the weight of authority 
make no impression on his opinions, which retire 
like a feather, or rise from the encounter unhurt, 
through their own buoyancy. He is clogged 
by no dull system of realities, no earth-bound 
feelings, no rooted prejudices, by nothing that 
belongs to the mighty trunk and hard husk of 
nature and habit, but is drawn up by irresistible 
levity to the regions of mere speculation and 
fancy, to the sphere of air and Are, where his 
delighted spirit floats in " seas of pearl and 
clouds of amber." There is no caput mortuum 
of worn-out, thread-bare experience to serve as 
ballast to his mind ; it is all volatile intellectual 

aaS 



356 ON PARADOX AND COMMON-PLACE. 

salt of tartar, that refuses to combine its eva- 
nescent, inflammable essence with anything solid 
or any thing lasting. Bubbles are to him the 
only realities : — touch them, and they vanish. 
Curiosity is the only proper category of his 
mind, and though a man in knowledge, he is a 
child in feeling. Hence he puts every thing 
into a metaphysical crucible to judge of it him- 
self and exhibit it to others as a subject of in- 
teresting experiment, without first making it 
over to the ordeal of his common sense or trying 
it on his heart. This faculty of speculating at 
random on all questions may in its overgrown 
and uninformed state do much mischief without 
intending it, like an overgrown child with the 
power of a man. Mr. Shelley has been accused 
of vanity — I think he is chargeable with extreme 
levity ; but this levity is so great, that I do not 
believe he is sensible of its consequences. He 
strives to overturn all established creeds and- 
systems : but this is in him an effect of con- 
stitution. He runs before the most extravagant 
opinions, but this is because he is held back 
by none of the merely mechanical checks of 
sympathy and habit. He tampers with all sorts 
of obnoxious subjects, but it is less because he 
is gratified with the rankness of the taint, than 



ON PARADOX AND COMMON-PLACE. 357 

captivated with the intellectual phosphoric light 
they emit. It would seem that he wished not 
so much to convince or inform as to shock the 
public by the tenor of his productions, but I 
suspect he is more intent upon startling himself 
with his electrical experiments in morals and 
philosophy; and though they may scorch other 
people, they are to him harmless amusements, 
the coruscations of an Aurora Borealis, that 
" play round the head, but do not reach the 
heart." Still I could wish that he would put a 
stop to the incessant, alarming whirl of his 
Voltaic battery. With his zeal, his talent, and 
his fancy, he would do more good and less 
harm, if he were to give up his wilder theories, 
and if he took less pleasure in feeling his heart 
flutter in unison with the panic-struck appre- 
hensions of his readers. Persons of this class, 
instead of consolidating useful and acknow- 
ledged truths, and thus advancing the cause of 
science and virtue, are never easy but in raising 
doubtful and disagreeable questions, which 
bring the former into disgrace and discredit. 
They are not contented to lead the minds of 
men to an eminence overlooking the prospect 
of social amelioration, unless, by forcing them 
up slippery paths and to the utmost verge of 
possibility, they can dash them down the pre- 



358 ON PARADOX AND COMMON-PLACE. 

cipice the instant they reach the promised 
Pisgah. They think it nothing to hang up a 
beacon to guide or warn, if they do not at the 
same time frighten the community like a comet. 
They do not mind making their principles 
odious, provided they can make themselves no- 
torious. To win over the public opinion by 
fair means is to them an insipid, common-place 
mode of popularity : they would either force it 
by harsh methods, or seduce it by intoxicating 
potions. Egotism, petulance, licentiousness, 
levity of principle (whatever be the source) is 
a bad thing in any one, and most of all, in a 
philosophical reformer. Their humanity, their 
wisdom is always " at the horizon." Any thing 
new, any thing remote, any thing questionable, 
comes to them in a shape that is sure of a cordial 
welcome — a welcome cordial in proportion as 
the object is new, as it is apparently impracti- 
cable, as it is a doubt whether it is at all de- 
sirable. Just after the final failure, the com- 
pletion of the last act of the French Revolution, 
when the legitimate wits were crying out, " The 
farce is over, now let us go to supper," these 
provoking reasoners got up a lively hypothesis 
about introducing the domestic government of 
the Nayrs into this country as a feasible set-off 
against the success of the Boroughmongers. 



ON PARADOX AND COMMON-PLACE. 359 

The practical is with them always the antipodes 
of the ideal ; and like other visionaries of a dif- 
ferent stamp, they date the Millennium or New 
Order of Things from the Restoration of the 
Bourbons. Fine words butter no parsnips, says 
the proverb. " While you are talking of marry- 
ing, I am thinking of hanging," says Captain 
Macheath. Of all people the most tormenting 
are those who bid you hope in the midst of 
despair, who, by never caring about any thing 
but their own sanguine, hair-brained Utopian 
schemes, have at no time any particular cause 
for embarrassment and despondency because 
they have never the least chance of success, and 
who by including whatever does not hit their 
idle fancy, kings, priests, religion, government, 
public abuses or private morals, in the same 
sweeping clause of ban and anathema, do all 
they can to combine all parties in a common 
cause against them, and to prevent every one 
else from advancing one step farther in the 
career of practical improvement than they do in 
that of imaginary and unattainable perfection. 

Besides, all this untoward heat and precocity 
often argues rottenness and a falling-off. I 
myself remember several instances of this sort 
of unrestrained license of opinion and violent 



360 ON PARADOX AND COMMON-PLACE. 

effervescence of sentiment in the first period of 
the French Revolution. Extremes meet : and 
the most furious anarchists have since become 
the most barefaced apostates. Among the fore- 
most of these I might mention the present poet- 
laureate and some of his friends. The prose- 
writers on that side of the question, Mr. God- 
win, Mr. Bentham, &c. have not turned round 
in this extraordinary manner: they seem to have 
felt their ground (however mistaken in some 
points) and have in general adhered to their first 
principles. But " poets (as it has been said) 
have such seething brains, that they are disposed 
to meddle with every thing, and mar all. They 
make bad philosophers and worse politicians *,« 
They live, for the most part, in an ideal world 
of their own ; and it would perhaps be as well 

* " As for politics, I think poets are tories by nature, 
supposing them to be by nature poets. The love of an 
individual person or family, that has worn a crown for many 
successions, is an inclination greatly adapted to the fanciful 
tribe. On the other hand, mathematicians, abstract rea- 
soners, of no manner of attachment to persons, at least to 
the visible part of them, but prodigiously devoted to the 
ideas of virtue, liberty, and so forth, are generally whigs. It 
happens agreeably enough to this maxim, that the whigs 
are friends to that wise, plodding, unpoetical people, the 
Dutch." — Shenstone's Letters, 1746, p. 105. 



ON PARADOX AND COMMON-PLACE. 36l 

if they were confined to it. Their flights and 
fancies are delightful to themselves and to every 
body else: but they make strange work with 
matter of fact ; and if they were allowed to act 
in public affairs, would soon turn the world the 
wrong side out. They indulge only their own 
flattering dreams or superstitious prejudices, and 
make idols or bug-bears of whatever they please, 
caring as little for history or particular facts 
as for general reasoning. They are dangerous 
leaders and treacherous followers. Their in- 
ordinate vanity runs them into all sorts of ex- 
travagances ; and their habitual effeminacy gets 
them out of them at any price. Always pam- 
pering their own appetite for excitement, and 
wishing to astonish others, their whole aim is to 
produce a dramatic effect, one way or other — 
to shock or delight the observers ; and they are 
apparently as indifferent to the consequences of 
what they write, as if the world were .merely a 
stage for them to play their fantastic tricks on, and 
to make their admirers weep. — Not less romantic 
in their servility than their independence, and 
equally importunate candidates for fame or in- 
famy, they require only to be distinguished, 
and are not scrupulous as to the means of di- 
stinction. Jacobins or Anti-Jacobins — outrage- 



36% ON PARADOX AND COMMON-PLACE. 

ous advocates for anarchy and licentiousness, 
or flaming apostles of political persecution — 
always violent and vulgar in their opinions, they 
oscillate, with a giddy and sickening motion, 
from one absurdity to another, and expiate the 
follies of youth by the heartless vices of ad- 
vancing age. None so ready as they to carry 
every paradox to its most revolting and ridicu- 
lous excess — none so sure to caricature, in their 
own persons, every feature of the prevailing 
philosophy! In their days of blissful innovation, 
indeed, the philosophers crept at their heels 
like hounds, while they darted on their distant 
quarry like hawks ; stooping always to the 
lowest game ; eagerly snuffing up the most 
tainted and rankest scents ; feeding their vanity 
with a notion of the strength of their digestion 
of poisons, and most ostentatiously avowing 
whatever would most effectually startle the pre- 
judices of others*. Preposterously seeking for 

* To give the modern reader un petit aperfu of the tone 
of literary conversation about five or six and twenty years 
ago, I remember being present in a large party composed 
of men, women, and children, in which two persons of re- 
markable candour and ingenuity were labouring (as hard as 
if they had been paid for it) to prove that all prayer was a 
mode of dictating to the Almighty, and an arrogant assump- 



ON PARADOX AND COMMON-PLACE. 303 

the stimulus of novelty in abstract truth, and 
the eclat of theatrical exhibition in pure reason, 
it is no wonder that these persons at last became 
disgusted with their own pursuits, and that, in 
consequence of the violence of the change, the 
most inveterate prejudices and uncharitable 

tion of superiority. A gentleman present said, with great 
simplicity and naivete, that there was one prayer which did 
not strike him as coming exactly under this description, and 
being asked what that was, made answer, " The Samaritan's 
— < Lord, Be merciful to me a sinner V " This appeal by 
no means settled the sceptical dogmatism of the two dis- 
putants, and soon after the proposer of the objection went 
away ; on which one of them observed with great marks of 
satisfaction and triumph — " I am afraid we have shocked 
that gentleman's prejudices/' This did not appear to me at 
that time quite the thing, and this happened in the year 
1794-. — Twice has the iron entered my soul. Twice have 
the dastard, vaunting, venal crew gone over it ; once as they 
went forth, conquering and to conquer, with reason by their 
side, glittering like a faulchion, trampling on prejudices and 
marching fearlessly on in the work of regeneration ; once 
again, when they returned with retrograde steps, like Cacus's 
oxen dragged backward by the heels, to the den of Legiti- 
macy, " rout on rout, confusion worse confounded," with 
places and pensions and the Quarterly Review dangling 
from their pockets, and shouting "Deliverance for mankind," 
for " the worst, the second fall of man." Yet I have endured 
all this marching and countermarching of poets, philosophers, 
and politicians over my head as well as I could, like " the 
camomoil that thrives, the more 'tis trod upon." By Heavens, 
I think, I'll endure it no longer ! 



364 ON PARADOX AND COMMON-PLACE. 

sentiments have rushed in to fill up the void 
produced by the previous annihilation of com- 
mon sense, wisdom, and humanity !" 

I have so far been a little hard on poets and 
reformers. Lest I should be thought to have 
taken a particular spite to them, I will try to 
make them the amende honorable by turning to 
a passage in the writings of one who neither is 
nor ever pretended to be a poet or a reformer, 
but the antithesis of both, an accomplished 
man of the world, a courtier, and a wit, and 
who has endeavoured to move the previous 
question on all schemes of fanciful improve- 
ment, and all plans of practical reform, by the 
following declaration. It is in itself a finished 
common-place; and may serve as a test whether 
that sort of smooth, verbal reasoning which 
passes current because it excites no one idea in 
the mind, is much freer from inherent absurdity 
than the wildest paradox. 

" My lot," says Mr. Canning in the conclu- 
sion of his Liverpool speech, " is cast under 
the British Monarchy. Under that I have 
lived ; under that I have seen my country 
flourish * 5 under that I have seen it enjoy as 
great a share of prosperity, of happiness, and 

* Troja fuit. 



ON PARADOX AND COMMON-PLACE. 365 

of glory, as I believe any modification of human 
society to be capable of bestowing; and I 
am not prepared to sacrifice or to hazard the 
fruit of centuries of experience, of centuries of 
struggles, and of more than one century of 
liberty, as perfect as ever blessed any country 
upon the earth, for visionary schemes of ideal 
perfectibility, for doubtful experiments even of 
possible improvement." — Mr. Canning *s Speech 
at the Liverpool Dinner, given in celebration of 
his Re-election, March 18, 1820. Fourth Edition, 
revised and corrected. 

Such is Mr. Canning's common-place ; and 
in giving the following answer to it, I do not 
think I can be accused of falling into that ex- 
travagant and unmitigated strain of paradoxical 
reasoning, with which I have already found so 
much fault. 

The passage then which the gentleman here 
throws down as an effectual bar to all change, 
to all innovation, to all improvement, contains 
at every step a refutation of his favourite creed. 
He is not " prepared to sacrifice or to hazard 
the fruit of centuries of experience, of centuries 
of struggles, and of one century of liberty, for 
visionary schemes of ideal perfectibility." So 
here are centuries of experience and centuries 
of struggles to arrive at one century qf liberty ; 



366 ON PARADOX AND COMMON-PLACE. 

and yet according to Mr. Canning's general 
advice, we are never to make any experiments 
or to engage in any struggles either with a 
view to future improvement, or to recover 
benefits which we have lost. Man (they repeat 
it in our ears, line upon line, precept upon 
precept) is always to turn his back upon the 
future, and his face to the past. He is to be- 
lieve that nothing is possible or desirable but 
what he finds already established to his hands 
in time-worn institutions or inveterate abuses. 
His understanding is to be buried in implicit 
creeds, and he himself is to be made into a 
political automaton, a go-cart of superstition 
and prejudice, never stirring hand or foot but 
as he is pulled by the wires and strings of the 
state-conjurors, the legitimate managers and 
proprietors of the shew. His powers of will, 
of thought, and action are to be paralysed in 
him, and he is to be told and to believe that 
whatever is, must be. Perhaps Mr. Canning 
will say that men were to make experiments, 
and to resolve upon struggles formerly, but 
that now they are to surrender their under- 
standings and their rights into his keeping. 
But at what period of the world was the system 
of political wisdom stereotyped, like Mr. Cob- 
bett's " Gold against Paper," so as to admit of 



ON PARADOX AND COMMON-PLACE. 367 

no farther alterations or improvements, or cor- 
rection of errors of the press ? When did the 
experience of mankind become stationary or 
retrograde, so that we must act from the ob- 
solete inferences of past periods, not from the 
living impulse of existing circumstances, and 
the consolidated force of the knowledge and 
reflection of ages up to the present instant, 
naturally projecting us forward into the future, 
and not driving us back upon the past ? Did 
Mr. Canning never hear, did he never think, 
of Lord Bacon's axiom, " That those times are 
the ancient times in which we live, and not 
those which counting backwards from our- 
selves, ordine retrograde, we call ancient ?" The 
latest periods must necessarily have the advan- 
tage of the sum-total of the experience that has 
gone before them, and of the sum-total of 
human reason exerted upon that experience, or 
upon the solid foundation of nature and history, 
moving on in its majestic course, not fluttering 
in the empty air of fanciful speculation, nor 
leaving a gap of centuries between us and the 
long-mouldered grounds on which we are to 
think and act. Mr. Canning cannot plead with 
Mr. Burke that no discoveries, no improve- 
ments have been made in political science and in- 
stitutions , for he says we have arrived through 



368 ON PARADOX AND COMMON-PLACE. 

centuries of experience and of struggles at one 
century of liberty. Is the world then at a 
stand ? Mr. Canning knows well enough that it 
is in ceaseless progress and everlasting change, 
but he would have it to be the change from 
liberty to slavery, the progress of corruption, 
not of regeneration and reform. Why, no 
longer ago than the present year, the two 
epochs of November and January last presented 
(he tells us in this very speech) as great a con- 
trast in the state of the country as any two 
periods of its history the most opposite or most 
remote. Well then, are our experience and 
our struggles at an end ? No, he says, " the 
crisis is at hand for every man to take part for, 
or against the institutions of the British Mo- 
narchy." His part is taken : " but of this be 
sure, to do aught good will never be his task !" 
He will guard carefully against all possible im- 
provements, and maintain all possible abuses 
sacred, impassive, immortal. He will not give 
up the fruit of centuries of experience, of 
struggles, and of one century at least of liberty, 
since the Revolution of 1688, for any doubtful 
experiments whatever. We are arrived at the 
end of our experience, our struggles, and our 
liberty — and are to anchor through time and 
eternity in the harbour of passive obedience 



ON PARADOX AND COMMON-PLACE. 36*9 

and non-resistance. We (the people of England) 
will tell Mr. Canning frankly what we think of 
his magnanimous and ulterior resolution. It is 
our own; and it has been the resolution of 
mankind in all ages of the world. No people, 
no age, ever threw away the fruits of past 
wisdom, or the enjoyment of present blessings, 
for visionary schemes of ideal perfection. It is 
the knowledge of the past, the actual infliction 
of the present, that has produced all changes, 
all innovations, and all improvements — not (as 
is pretended) the chimerical anticipation of 
possible advantages, but the intolerable pres- 
sure of long-established, notorious, aggravated, 
and growing abuses. It was the experience of 
the enormous and disgusting abuses and cor- 
ruptions of the Papal power that produced the 
Reformation. It was the experience of the 
vexations and oppressions of the feudal system 
that produced its abolition after centuries of 
sufferings and of struggles. It was the expe- 
rience of the caprice and tyranny of the Mo- 
narch that extorted Magna Charta at Runny- 
mede. It was the experience of the arbitrary 
and insolent abuse of the prerogative in the 
reigns of the Tudors and the first Stuarts that 
produced the resistance to it in the reign of 
Charles I. and the Grand Rebellion. It was 

B B 



370 ON PARADOX AND COMMON-PLACE. 

/ 

the experience of the incorrigible attachment 
of the same Stuarts to Popery and Slavery, 
with their many acts of cruelty, treachery, and 
bigotry, that produced the Revolution, and set 
the House of Brunswick on the Throne. It 
was the conviction of the incurable nature of 
the abuse, increasing with time and patience, 
and overcoming the obstinate attachment to 
old habits and prejudices, an attachment not to 
be rooted out by fancy or theory, but only by 
repeated, lasting, and incontrovertible proofs, 
that has abated every nuisance that ever was 
abated, and introduced every innovation and 
every example of revolution and reform. It 
was the experience of the abuses, licentious- 
ness, and innumerable oppressions of the old 
Government in France that produced the 
French Revolution. It was the experience of 
the determination of the British Ministry to 
harass, insult, and plunder them, that produced 
the Revolution of the United States. Away 
then with this miserable cant against fanciful 
theories, and appeal to acknowledged expe- 
rience ! Men never act against their prejudices 
but from the spur of their feelings, the ne- 
cessity of their situations — their theories are 
adapted to their practical convictions and their 
varying circumstances. Nature has ordered it 



ON PARADOX AND COMMON-PLACE. 37* 

so, and Mr. Canning, by shewing off his rhe- 
torical paces, by his " ambling and lisping and 
nicknaming God's creatures," cannot invert 
that order, efface the history of the past, or 
arrest the* progress of the future. — Public opi- 
nion is the result of public events and public 
feelings ; and government must be moulded by 
that opinion, or maintain itself in opposition to it 
by the sword. Mr. Canning indeed will not con- 
sent that the social machine should in any case 
receive a different direction from what it has had, 
" lest it should be hurried over the precipice and 
dashed to pieces." These warnings of national 
ruin and terrific accounts of political precipices 
put one in mind of Edgar's exaggerations to 
Gloster: they make one's hair stand on end 
in the perusal ; but the poor old man, like 
poor Old England, could fall no lower than he 
was. Mr. Montgomery, the ingenious and 
amiable poet, after he had been shut up in 
solitary confinement for a year and a half for 
printing the Duke of Richmond's Letter on 
Reform, when he first walked out into the 
narrow path of the adjoining field, was seized 
with an apprehension that he should fall over 
it, as if he had trod on the brink of an abrupt 
declivity. The author of the loyal Speech at 
the Liverpool Dinner has been so long kept in 

bb2 



372 ON PARADOX AND COMMON-PLACE. 

the solitary confinement of his prejudices, and 
the dark cells of his interest and vanity, that he 
is afraid of being dashed to pieces if he makes 
a single false step, to the right or the left, from 
his dangerous and crooked policy. As to him- 
self, his ears are no doubt closed to any advice 
that might here be offered him j and as to his 
country, he seems bent on its destruction. If, 
however, an example of the futility of all his 
projects and all his reasonings on a broader 
scale, " to warn and scare, be wanting," let him 
look at Spain, and take leisure to recover from 
his incredulity and his surprise. Spain, as 
Ferdinand, as the Monarchy, has fallen from its 
pernicious height, never to rise again : Spain, 
as Spain, as the Spanish people, has risen from 
the tomb of liberty, never (it is to be hoped) to 
sink again under the yoke of the bigot and the 
oppressor ! 



ESSAY XVI. 
ON VULGARITY AND AFFECTATION. 



ESSAY XVI. 
ON VULGARITY AND AFFECTATION, 



Few subjects are more nearly allied than 
these two — vulgarity and affectation. It may 
be said of them truly that " thin partitions do 
their bounds divide." There cannot be a surer 
proof of a low origin or of an innate meanness of 
disposition, than to be always talking and think- 
ing of being genteel. One must feel a strong 
tendency to that which one is always trying to 
avoid : whenever we pretend, on all occasions, 
a mighty contempt for any thing, it is a pretty 
clear sign that we feel ourselves very nearly on 
a level with it. Of the two classes of people, I 
hardly know which is to be regarded with most 
distaste, the vulgar aping the genteel, or the 
genteel constantly sneering at and endeavour- 
ing to distinguish themselves from the vulgar. 
These two sets of persons are always thinking 
of one another; the lower of the higher with 
envy, the more fortunate of their less happy 
neighbours with contempt. They are habitually 



376 ON VULGARITY AND AFFECTATION. 

placed in opposition to each other ; jostle in 
their pretensions at every turn ; and the same 
objects and train of thought (only reversed by 
the relative situation of either party) occupy 
their whole time and attention. The one are 
straining every nerve, and outraging common 
sense, to be thought genteel ; the others have no 
other object or idea in their heads than not to 
be thought vulgar. This is but poor spite ; a 
very pitiful style of ambition. To be merely 
not that which one heartily despises, is a very 
humble claim to superiority: to despise what 
one really is, is still worse. Most of the cha- 
racters in Miss Burney's novels, the Branghtons, 
the Smiths, the Dubsters, the Cecilias, the Del- 
villes, &c. are well met in this respect, and 
much of a piece ; the one half are trying not 
to be taken for themselves, and the other half 
not to be taken for the first. They neither of 
them have any pretensions of their own, or real 
standard of worth. " A feather will turn the 
scale of their avoirdupois :" though the fair 
authoress was not aware of the metaphysical 
identity of her principal and subordinate cha- 
racters. Affectation is the master-key to both. 
Gentility is only a more select and artificial 
kind of vulgarity. It cannot exist but by a 
sort of borrowed distinction. It plumes itself 



ON VULGARITY AND AFFECTATION. 377 

up and revels in the homely pretensions of the 
mass of mankind. It judges of the worth of 
every thing by name, fashion, opinion; and 
hence, from the conscious absence of real qua- 
lities or sincere satisfaction in itself, it builds 
its supercilious and fantastic conceit on the 
wretchedness and wants of others. Violent 
antipathies are always suspicious, and betray a 
secret affinity. The difference between the 
" Great Vulgar and the Small" is mostly in out- 
ward circumstances. The coxcomb criticises 
the dress of the clown, as the pedant cavils at 
the bad grammar of the illiterate, or the prude 
is shocked at the backslidings of her frail ac- 
quaintance. Those who have the fewest re- 
sources in themselves, naturally seek the food 
of their self-love elsewhere. The most ignorant 
people find most to laugh at in strangers : 
scandal and satire prevail most in country- 
places ; and a propensity to ridicule every the 
slightest or most palpable deviation from what 
we happen to approve, ceases with the progress 
of common sense and decency*. True worth 

* " If an European, when he has cut off his beard and 
put false hair on his head, or bound up his own natural hair 
in regular hard knots, as unlike nature as he can possibly 
make it ; and after having rendered them immoveable by 
the help of the tat of hogs, has covered the whole with 



378 ON VULGARITY AND AFFECTATION* 

does not exult in the faults and deficiencies of 
others ; as true refinement turns away from 
grossness and deformity, instead of being 
tempted to indulge in an unmanly triumph 
over it. Raphael would not faint away at the 
daubing of a sign-post, nor Homer hold his 
head the higher for being in the company of a 
Grub-street bard. Real power, real excellence, 
J does not seek for a foil in inferiority; nor fear 
? contamination from coming in contact with 
' that which is coarse and homely. It reposes 
on itself, and is equally free from spleen and 
affectation. But the spirit of gentility is the 
mere essence of spleen and affectation; — of 
affected delight in its own would-be qualifica- 
tions, and of ineffable disdain poured out upon 
the involuntary blunders or accidental dis- 
, advantages of those whom it chooses to treat as 
its inferiors. — Thus a fashionable Miss titters 



flour, laid on by a machine with the utmost regularity ; if 
when thus attired he issues forth, and meets a Cherokee 
Indian, who has bestowed as much time at his toilet, and 
laid on with equal care and attention his yellow and red 
oker on particular parts of his forehead or cheeks, as he 
judges most becoming ; whoever of these two despises the 
other for this attention to the fashion of his country, which- 
ever first feels himself provoked to laugh, is the barbarian." 
—Sir Joshua Reynolds's Discourses, Vol. I. p. 231 — 2. 



ON VULGARITY AND AFFECTATION. 379 

till she is ready to burst her sides at the un- 
couth shape of a bonnet, or the abrupt drop of 
a courtesy (such as Jeanie Deans would make) 
in a country-girl who comes to be hired by her 
Mamma as a servant : — yet to shew how little 
foundation there is for this hysterical expression 
of her extreme good opinion of herself and 
contempt for the untutored rustic, she would 
herself the next day be delighted with the very 
same shaped bonnet if brought her by a French 
milliner and told it was all the fashion, and in a 
week's time will become quite familiar with the 
maid, and chatter with her (upon equal terms) 
about caps and ribbons and lace by the hour 
together. There is no difference between them 
but that of situation in the kitchen or in the 
parlour : let circumstances bring them together, 
and they fit like hand and glove. It is like 
mistress, like maid. Their talk, their thoughts, 
their dreams, their likings and dislikes are the 
same. The mistress's head runs continually on 
dress and finery, so does the maid's : the young 
lady longs to ride in a coach and six, so does 
the maid, if she could : Miss forms a beau ideal 
of a lover with black eyes and rosy cheeks, 
which does not differ from that of her attend- 
ant : both like a smart man, the one the foot- 
man and the other his master, for the same 



380 ON VULGARITY AND AFFECTATION. 

reason : both like handsome furniture and fine 
houses : both apply the terms, shocking and dis- 
agreeable, to the same things and persons : both 
have a great notion of balls, plays, treats, song- 
books and love-tales : both like a wedding or a 
christening, and both would give their little 
fingers to see a coronation, with this difference, 
that the one has a chance of getting a seat at it, 
and the other is dying with envy that she has 
not. — Indeed, this last is a ceremony that de- 
lights equally the greatest monarch and the 
meanest of his subjects — the vilest of the rabble. 
Yet this which is the height of gentility and 
the consummation of external distinction and 
splendour, is, I should say, a vulgar ceremony. 
For what degree of refinement, of capacity, of 
virtue is required in the individual who is so 
distinguished, or is necessary to his enjoying 
this idle and imposing parade of his person ? Is 
he delighted with the state-coach and gilded 
pannels ? So is the poorest wretch that gazes at 
it. Is he struck with the spirit, the beauty and 
symmetry of the eight cream-coloured horses ? 
There is not one of the immense multitude, 
who flock to see the sight from town or country, 
St. Giles's or Whitechapel, young or old, rich 
or poor, gentle or simple, who does not agree 
to admire the same object. Is he delighted with 



ON VULGARITY AND AFFECTATION. 3S1 

the yeomen of the guard, the military escort, 
the groups of ladies, the badges of sovereign 
power, the kingly crown, the marshal's truncheon 
and the judge's robe, the array that precedes and 
follows him, the crowded streets, the windows 
hung with eager looks ? So are the mob, for 
they " have eyes and see them !" There is no 
one faculty of mind or body, natural or acquired, 
essential to the principal figure in this pro- 
cession, more than is common to the meanest 
and most despised attendant on it. A wax- 
work figure would answer the same purpose : a 
Lord Mayor of London has as much tinsel to 
be proud of. I would rather have a king do 
something that no one else has the power or 
magnanimity to do, or say something that no 
one else has the wisdom to say, or look more 
handsome, more thoughtful, or benign than any 
one else in his dominions. But I see nothing 
to raise one's idea of him in his being made 
a shew of: if the pageant would do as well 
without the man, the man would do as well 
without the pageant! Kings have been de- 
clared to be " lovers of low company :" and 
this maxim, besides the reason sometimes as- 
signed for it, viz. that they meet with less op- 
position to their wills from such persons, will I 
suspect be found to turn at last on the con- 
sideration I am here stating, that thev also meet 



382 ON VULGARITY AND AFFECTATION. 

with more sympathy in their tastes. The most 
ignorant and thoughtless have the greatest ad- 
miration of the baubles, the outward symbols of 
pomp and power, the sound and shew, which are 
the habitual delight and mighty prerogative of 
kings. The stupidest slave worships the gaudiest 
tyrant. The same gross motives appeal to the 
same gross capacities, flatter the pride of the 
superior and excite the servility of the depend- 
ant : whereas a higher reach of moral and intel- 
lectual refinement might seek in vain for higher 
proofs of internal worth and inherent majesty in 
the object of its idolatry, and not finding the 
divinity lodged within, the unreasonable ex- 
pectation raised would probably end in morti- 
fication on both sides ! — There is little to di- 
stinguish a king from his subjects but the rabble's 
shout — if he loses that and is reduced to the 
forlorn hope of gaining the suffrages of the wise 
and good, he is of all men the most miserable. 
— But enough of this. 

" I like it," says Miss Branghton* in Evelina 
(meaning the Opera) " because it is not vulgar." 

* This name was originally spelt Braughton in the Ma- 
nuscript, and was altered to Branghton by a mistake of the 
printer. Branghton, however, was thought a good name for 
the occasion and was suffered to stand. " Dip it in the 
ocean," as Sterne's barber says of the buckle,, " and it will 
stand !" 



ON VULGARITY AND AFFECTATION. 383 

That is, she likes it, not because there is any 
thing to like in it, but because other people are 
prevented from liking or knowing any thing 
about it. Janus Weathercock, Esq. laugheth to 
scorn and spitefully entreateth and hugely con- 
demneth my dramatic criticisms in the London, 
for a like exquisite reason. I must therefore 
make an example of him in terrorem to all such 
hypercritics. He finds fault with me and calls 
my taste vulgar, because I go to Sadler's Wells 
("a place he has heard of" — O Lord, Sir !) — 
because I notice the Miss Dennetts, " great 
favourites with the Whitechapel orders" — praise 
Miss Valancy, " a bouncing Columbine at 
Ashley's and them there places, as his barber 
informs him" (has he no way of establishing 
himself in his own good opinion but by triumph- 
ing over his barber's bad English?) — and finally, 
because I recognise the existence of the Cobourg 
and the Surrey theatres, at the names of which 
he cries " Faugh" with great significance, as if 
he had some personal disgust at them, and yet 
he would be supposed never to have entered 
them. It is not his cue as a well-bred critic. 
Cest bean ga. Now this appears to me a very 
crude, unmeaning, indiscriminate, wholesale and 
vulgar way of thinking. It is prejudging things 
in the lump, by names and places and classes, 



384> ON VULGARITY AND AFFECTATION. 

instead of judging of them by what they are in 
themselves, by their real qualities and shades of 
distinction. There is no selection, truth, or 
delicacy in such a mode of proceeding. It is 
affecting ignorance, and making it a title to 
wisdom. It is a vapid assumption of superiority. 
It is exceeding impertinence. It is rank cox- 
combry. It is nothing in the world else. To 
condemn because the multitude admire is as 
essentially vulgar as to admire because they ad- 
mire. There is no exercise of taste or judg- 
ment in either case : both are equally repug- 
nant to good sense, and of the two I should 
prefer the good-natured side. I would as soon 
agree with my barber as differ from him : and 
why should I make a point of reversing the 
sentence of the Whitechapel orders ? Or how 
can it affect my opinion of the merits of an 
actor at the Cobourg or the Surrey theatres, 
that these theatres are in or out of the Bills 
of Mortality ? This is an easy, short-hand way 
of judging, as gross as it is mechanical. It is 
not a difficult matter to settle questions of taste 
by consulting the map of London, or to prove 
your liberality by geographical distinctions. 
Janus jumbles things together strangely. If he 
had seen Mr. Kean in a provincial theatre, at 
Exeter or Taunton, he would have thought it 



ON VULGARITY AND AFFECTATION. 385 

vulgar to admire him : but when he had been 
stamped in London, Janus would no doubt shew 
his discernment and the subtlety of his tact for 
the display of character and passion, by not 
being behind the fashion. The Miss Dennetts 
are "little unformed girls,'' for no other reason 
than because they danced at one of the Minor 
Theatres : let them but come out on the Opera 
boards, and let the beauty and fashion of the 
season greet them with a fairy shower of de- 
lighted applause, and they would outshine 
Milanie " with the foot of fire." His gorge 
rises at the mention of a certain quarter of the 
town : whatever passes current in another, he 
" swallows total grist unsifted, husks and all." 
This is not taste, but folly. At this rate, the 
hackney-coachman who drives him, or his horse 
Contributor whom he has introduced as a select 
personage to the vulgar reader, knows as much 
of the matter as he does. — In a word, the answer 
to all this in the first instance is to say what 
vulgarity is. Now its essence, I imagine, con- 
sists in taking manners, actions, words, opinions 
on trust from others, without examining one's 
own feelings or weighing the merits of the case. 
It is coarseness or shallowness of taste arising 
from want of individual refinement, together 
with the confidence and presumption inspired 

c c 



386 ON VULGARITY AND AFFECTATION. 

by example and numbers. It may be defined 
to be a prostitution of the mind or body to ape 
the more or less obvious defects of others, be- 
cause by so doing we shall secure the suffrages 
of those we associate with. To affect a gesture, 
an opinion, a phrase, because it is the rage witli 
a large number of persons, or to hold it in ab- 
horrence because another set of persons very 
little, if at all, better informed, cry it down to 
distinguish themselves from the former, is in 
either case equal vulgarity and absurdity. — A 
thing is not vulgar merely because it is common. 
'lis common to breathe, to see, to feel, to live. 
Nothing is vulgar that is natural, spontaneous, 
unavoidable. Grossness is not vulgarity, ig- 
norance is not vulgarity, awkwardness is not 
vulgarity: but all these become vulgar when 
they are affected and shewn off on the authority 
of others, or to fall in with the fashion or the 
company we keep. Caliban is coarse enough, 
but surely he is not vulgar. We might as well 
spurn the clod under our feet, and call it vulgar. 
Cobbett is coarse enough, but he is not vulgar. 
He does not belong to the herd. Nothing real, 
nothing original can be vulgar : but I should 
think an imitator of Cobbett a vulgar man. 
Emery's Yorkshireman is vulgar, because he is 
a Yorkshireman. It is the cant and gibberish, 



ON VULGARITY AND AFFECTATION. 387 

the cunning and low life of a particular district ; 
it has " a stamp exclusive and provincial." He 
might " gabble most brutishly" and yet not fall 
under the letter of the definition : but " his 
speech bewrayeth him," his dialect (like the 
jargon of a Bond-street lounger) is the damn- 
ing circumstance. If he were a mere block- 
head, it would not signify : but he thinks him- 
self a knowing hand, according to the notions 
and practices of those with whom he was brought 
up, and which he thinks the go every where. In 
a word, this character is not the offspring of 
untutored nature but of bad habits ; it is made 
up of ignorance and conceit. It has a mixture 
of slang in it. All slang phrases are for the 
same reason vulgar ; but there is nothing vulgar 
in the common English idiom. Simplicity is 
not vulgarity ; but the looking to affectation of 
any sort for distinction is. A cockney is a 
vulgar character, whose imagination cannot 
wander beyond the suburbs of the metropolis : 
so is a fellow who is always thinking of the 
High-street, Edinburgh. We want a name for 
this last character. An opinion is vulgar that 
is stewed in the rank breath of the rabble : nor 
is it a bit purer or more refined for having passed 
through the well cleansed teeth of a whole court. 
The inherent vulgarity is in having no other 
feeling on any subject than the crude, blind, 



c v 



o 



388 ON VULGARITY AND AFFECTATION. 

headlong, gregarious notion acquired by sym- 
pathy with the mixed multitude or with a fas- 
tidious minority, who are just as insensible to the 
real truth, and as indifferent to every thing but 
their own frivolous and vexatious pretensions. 
The upper are not wiser than the lower orders, 
because they resolve to differ from them. The 
fashionable have the advantage of the unfashion- 
able in nothing but the fashion. The true 
vulgar are the servum pecus imitatorum — the 
herd of pretenders to what they do not feel and 
to what is not natural to them, whether in high 
or low life. To belong to any class, to move in 
any rank or sphere of life, is not a very ex- 
clusive distinction or test of refinement. Re- 
finement will in all classes be the exception, not 
the rule ; and the exception may fall out in 
one class as well as another. A king is but an 
hereditary title. A nobleman is only one of 
the House of Peers. To be a knight or alder- 
man is confessedly a vulgar thing. The king 
the other day made Sir Walter Scott a baronet, 
but not all the power of the Three Estates could 
make another Author of Waverley. Princes, 
heroes are often common-place people : Hamlet 
was not a vulgar character, neither was Don 
Quixote. To be an author, to be a painter, is 
nothing. It is a trick, it is a trade. 



ON VULGARITY AND AFFECTATION. 389 

" An author ! 'tis a venerable name : 
How few deserve it, yet what numbers claim !" 

Nay, to be a Member of the Royal Academy, 
or a Fellow of the Royal Society, is but a vulgar 
distinction. Bat to be a Virgil, a Milton, a 
Raphael, a Claude, is what fell to the lot of 
humanity but once ! I do not think they were 
vulgar people, though for any thing I know to 
the contrary the first Lord of the Bed-chamber 
may be a very vulgar man : for any thing I 
know to the contrary, he may not be so. — 
Such are pretty much my notions of gentility 
and vulgarity. 

There is a well-dressed and an ill-dressed 
mob, both which I hate. Odi prqfanum vidgus, 
et arceo. The vapid affectation of the one is 
to me even more intolerable than the gross 
insolence and brutality of the other. If a set of 
low-lived fellows are noisy, rude, and boisterous 
to shew their disregard of the company, a set 
of fashionable coxcombs are, to a nauseous 
degree, finical and effeminate to shew their 
thorough breeding. The one are governed by 
their feelings, however coarse and misguided, 
which is something : the others consult only 
appearances, which are nothing, either as a test 
of happiness or virtue. Hogarth in his prints 
has trimmed the balance of pretension between 



390 ON VULGARITY AND AFFECTATION. 

the downright blackguard and the soi-disant 
fine gentleman unanswerably. It does not ap- 
pear in his moral demonstrations (whatever it 
may do in the genteel letter-writing of Lord 
Chesterfield, or the chivalrous rhapsodies of 
Burke) that vice by losing all its grossness 
loses half its evil. It becomes more con- 
temptible, not less disgusting. What is there in 
common, for instance, between his beaux and 
belles, his rakes and his coquets, and the men 
and women, the true heroic and ideal cha- 
racters in Raphael ? But his people of fashion 
and quality are just upon a par with the low, 
the selfish, the unideal characters in the con- 
trasted view of human life, and are often the 
very same characters, only changing places. 
If the lower ranks are actuated by envy and 
uncharitableness towards the upper, the latter 
have scarcely any feelings but of pride, con- 
tempt, and aversion to the lower. If the poor 
would pull down the rich to get at their good 
things, the rich would tread down the poor as 
in a vine-press, and squeeze the last shilling 
out of their pockets and the last drop of blood 
out of their veins. If the headstrong self-will 
and unruly turbulence of a common ale-house 
are shocking, what shall we say to the studied in- 
sincerity, the insipid want of common sense, the 
callous insensibility of the drawing-room and 






ON VULGARITY AND AFFECTATION. 391 

boudoir? I would rather see the feelings of 
our common nature (for they are the same at 
bottom) expressed in the most naked and un- 
qualified way, than see every feeling of our 
nature suppressed, stifled, hermetically sealed 
under the smooth, cold, glittering varnish of 
pretended refinement and conventional polite- 
ness. The one may be corrected by being 
better informed; the other is incorrigible, wil- 
ful, heartless depravity. I cannot describe the 
contempt and disgust I have felt at the tone of 
what would be thought good company, when I 
have witnessed the sleek, smiling, glossy, gra- 
tuitous assumption of superiority to every feel- 
ing of humanity, honesty or principle, as a part 
of the etiquette, the mental and moral costume 
of the table, and every profession of toleration 
or favour for the lower orders, that is, for the 
great mass of our fellow-creatures, treated as 
an indecorum and breach of the harmony of 
well-regulated society. In short, I prefer a 
bear-garden to the adder's den. Or to put this 
case in its extremest point of view, I have 
more patience with men in a rude state of 
nature outraging the human form, than I have 
with apes " making mops and mows" at the 
extravagances they have first provoked. I can 
endure the brutality (as it is termed) of mobs 
better than the inhumanity of courts. The vio- 



392 ON VULGARITY AND AFFECTATION. 

lence of the one rages like a fire ; the insidious 
policy of the other strikes like a pestilence, and 
is more fatal and inevitable. The slow poison 
of despotism is worse than the convulsive 
struggles of anarchy. " Of all evils," says 
Hume, " anarchy is the shortest lived." The 
one may "break out like a wild overthrow;" 
but the other from its secret, sacred stand, 
operates unseen, and undermines the happiness 
of kingdoms for ages, lurks in the hollow cheek 
and stares you in the face in the ghastly eye of 
want and agony and woe. It is dreadful to 
hear the noise and uproar of an infuriated mul- 
titude stung by the sense of wrong, and mad- 
dened by sympathy: it is more appalling to 
think of the smile answered by other gracious 
smiles, of the whisper echoed by other assenting 
whispers, which doom them first to despair and 
then to destruction. Popular fury finds its 
counterpart in courtly servility. If every out- 
rage is to be apprehended from the one, every 
iniquity is deliberately sanctioned by the other, 
without regard to justice or decency. The 
word of a king, " Go thou and do likewise," 
makes the stoutest heart dumb : truth and 
honesty shrink before it*. If there are watch- 

* A lady of quality, in allusion to the gallantries of a 
reigning Prince, being told, " I suppose it will be your 



ON VULGARITY AND AFFECTATION. 393 

words for the rabble, have not the polite and 
fashionable their hackneyed phrases, their ful- 
some unmeaning jargon as well ? Both are to 
me anathema ! 

To return to the first question, as it regards 
individual and private manners. There is a 
fine illustration of the effects of preposterous 
and affected gentility in the character of Ger- 
trude, in the old comedy of Eastward Hoe, 
written by Ben Jonson, Marston, and Chapman 
in conjunction. This play is supposed to have 
given rise to Hogarth's series of prints of the 
Idle and Industrious Apprentice ; and there is 
something exceedingly Hogarthian in the view 
both of vulgar and of genteel life here dis- 
played. The character of Gertrude in parti- 
cular, the heroine of the piece, is inimitably 
drawn. The mixture of vanity and meanness, 
the internal worthlessness and external pre- 
tence, the rustic ignorance and fine lady-like 
airs, the intoxication of novelty and infatuation 
of pride, appear like a dream or romance, 
rather than any thing in real life. Cinderella 
and her glass-slipper are common-place to it. 
She is not, like Millamant (a century after- 
wards) the accomplished fine lady, but a pre- 

turn next ?" said, "No: I hope not ; for you know it is im- 
possible to refuse !" 



394 ON VULGARITY AND AFFECTATION. 

tender to all the foppery and finery of the cha- 
racter. It is the honey-moon with her lady- 
ship, and her folly is at the full. To be a wife 
and the wife of a knight are to her pleasures 
" worn in their newest gloss," and nothing can 
exceed her raptures in the contemplation of 
both parts of the dilemma. It is not familiarity 
but novelty, that weds her to the court. She 
rises into the air of gentility from the ground 
of a city life, and flutters about there with all 
the fantastic delight of a butterfly that has j ust 
changed its caterpillar state. The sound of 
My Lady intoxicates her with delight, makes 
her giddy, and almost turns her brain. On 
the bare strength of it she is ready to turn her 
father and mother out of doors, and treats her 
brother and sister with infinite disdain and j u- 
dicial hardness of heart. With some specu- 
lators the modern philosophy has deadened and 
distorted all the natural affections : and before 
abstract ideas and the mischievous refinements 
of literature were introduced, nothing was to 
be met with in the primeval state of society 
but simplicity and pastoral innocence of man- 
ners — 

" And all was conscience and tender heart." 

This historical play gives the lie to the above 
theory pretty broadly, yet delicately. Our heroine 



ON VULGARITY AND AFFECTATION. 3 ( J5 

is as vain as she is ignorant, and as unprincipled 
as she is both ; and without an idea or wish of 
any kind but that of adorning her person in the 
glass, and being called and thought a lady, 
something superior to a citizen's wife*. She 

* " Girtred. For the passion of patience, look if Sir Pe- 
tronel approach. That sweet, that fine, that delicate, that 
for love's sake, tell me if he come. Oh, sister Mill, 
though my father be a low-capt tradesman, yet I must be a 
lady, and I praise God my mother must call me madam. 
Does he come ? Off with this gown for shame's sake, off 
with this gown ! Let not my knight take me in the city 
cut, in any hand! Tear't! Pox on't (does he come?) 
tear't off! Thus while she sleeps, I sorrow for her sake. (Sings.) 

Mildred. Lord, sister, with what an immodest impatiency 
and disgraceful scorn do you put off your city -tire ! 1 am 
sorry to think you imagine to right yourself in wronging 
that which hath made both you and us. 

Gir. I tell you, I cannot endure it: I must be a lady: 
do you wear your quoiff with a London licket ! your stamel 
petticoat with two guards! the buffin gown with the tuf- 
tafitty cap and the velvet lace ! I must be a lady, and I 
will be a lady. I like some humours of the city dames well : 
to eat cherries only at an angel a pound ; good : to dye rich 
scarlet black ; pretty : to line a grogram gown clean through 
with velvet ; tolerable : their pure linen, their smocks of 
three pound a smock, are to be borne withal : but your 
mincing niceries, taffity pipkins, durance petticoats, and 
silver bodkins — God's my life ! as I shall be a lady, I cannot 
endure it. 

Mil. Well, sister, those that scorn their nest, oft fly wit Ii 
a sick wing. 

Gir. Bow-bell ! Alas, poor Mill, when I am a lady, I'll 



396 ON VULGARITY AND AFFECTATION. 

is so bent on finery that she believes in miracles 
to obtain it, and expects the fairies to bring it 

pray for thee yet i'faith ; nay, and I'll vouchsafe to call thee 
sister Mill still ; for though thou art not like to be a lady as 
I am, yet surely thou art a creature of God's making, and 
may'st peradventure be saved as soon as I (does he come?). 
And ever and anon she doubled in he?" song. 

Mil. Now (lady's my comfort) what a profane ape 's here ! 

Enter Sir Petronel Flash, Mr. Touchstone, and Mrs. 
Touchstone. 

Gir. Is my knight come ? O the lord, my band ! Sister, 
do my cheeks look well ? Give me a little box o* the ear, 
that I may seem to blush. Now, now! so, there, there! 
here he is ! O my dearest delight ! Lord, lord ! and how 
does my knight ? 

Touchstone. Fie, with more modesty. 

Gir. Modesty! why, I am no citizen now. Modesty! am 
I not to be married ? You're best to keep me modest, now 
I am to be a lady. 

Sir Petronel. Boldness is a good fashion, and court-like. 

Gir. Aye, in a country lady I hope it is, as I shall be. 
And how chance ye came no sooner, knight? 

Sir Pet. Faith, I was so entertained in the progress with 
one Count Epernoun, a Welch knight: we had a match at 
baloon too with my Lord Whackum for four crowns. 

Gir. And when shall 's be married, my knight ? 

Sir Pet. I am come now to consummate : and your father 
may call a poor knight son-in-law. 

Mrs. Touchstone. Yes, that he is a knight : I know where 
he had money to pay the gentlemen ushers and heralds their 
fees. Aye, that he is a knight: and so might you have 
been too, if you had been aught else but an ass, as well as 
some of your neighbours. An I thought you would not ha' 
been knighted, as I am an honest woman, I would ha' dubbed 



ON VULGARITY AND AFFECTATION. 397 

her*. She is quite above thinking of a settle- 
ment, jointure, or pin-money. She takes the 

you myself. I praise God, I have wherewithal. But as for 
you, daughter 

Gir, Aye, mother, I must be a lady to-morrow ; and by 
your leave, mother (I speak it not without my duty, but 
only in the right of my husband) I must take place of you, 
mother. 

Mrs. Touch. That you shall, lady-daughter; and have a 
coach as well as I. 

Gir. Yes, mother ; but my coach-horses must take the 
wall of your coach-horses. 

Touch. Come, come, the day grows low; 'tis supper- 
time : and sir, respect my daughter ; she has refused for 
you wealthy and honest matches, known good men. 

Gir. Body o' truth, citizen, citizens ! Sweet knight, as 
soon as ever we are married, take me to thy mercy, out of 
this miserable city. Presently: carry me out of the scent 
of Newcastle coal and the hearing of Bow-bell, I beseech 
thee; down with me, for God's sake." Act I. Scene I. 

This dotage on sound and show seemed characteristic of 
that age (see New Way to Pay Old Debts, &c.) — as if in 
the grossness of sense, and the absence of all intellectual 
and abstract topics of thought and discourse (the thin, cir- 
culating medium of the present day) the mind was attracted 
without the power of resistance to the tinkling sound of its 
own name with a title added to it, and the image of its own 
person tricked out in old-fashioned finery. The effect, no 
doubt, was also more marked and striking from the contrast 
between the ordinary penury and poverty of the age and the 
first and more extravagant demonstrations of luxury and 
artificial refinement. 

* " Girtred. Good lord, that there are no fairies dow- 
a-days, Syn. 



398 ON VULGARITY AND AFFECTATION. 

will for the deed all through the piece, and is 
so besotted with this ignorant, vulgar notion of 
rank and title as a real thing that cannot be coun- 
terfeited, that she is the dupe of her own fine 
stratagems, and marries a gull, a dolt, a broken 
adventurer for an accomplished and brave gen- 
tleman. Her meanness is equal to her folly and 
her pride (and nothing can be greater), yet she 
holds out on the strength of her original pre- 
tensions for a long time, and plays the upstart 
with decent and imposing consistency. Indeed 

Syndefy. Why, Madam ? 

Gir. To do miracles, and bring ladies money. Sure, if 
we lay in a cleanly house, they would haunt it, Synne ? I'll 
try. I'll sweep the chamber soon at night, and set a dish of 
water o' the hearth. A fairy may come and bring a pearl 
or a diamond. We do not know, Synne : or there may be a 
pot of gold hid in the yard, if we had tools to dig for *t. 
Why may not we two rise early i' the morning, Synne, afore 
any body is up, and find a jewel i' the streets worth a hundred 
pounds? May not some great court-lady, as she comes 
from revels at midnight, look out of her coach, as 'tis run- 
ning, and lose such a jewel, and we find it? ha ! 

Syn. They are pretty waking dreams, these. 

Gir. Or may not some old usurer be drunk over-night 
with a bag of money, and leave it behind him on a stall ? 
For God's sake, Syn, let's rise to-morrow by break of day, 
and see. I protest, la, if I had as much money as an alder- 
man, I would scatter some on't i' the streets, for poor ladies 
to find when their knights were laid up. And now I remember 
my song of the Golden Shower, why may not I have such a 
fortune? I'll sing it, and try what luck I shall have after 
it." Act V. Scene 1. 



ON VULGARITY AND AFFECTATION. 399 

her infatuation and caprices are akin to the 
flighty perversity of a disordered imagination ; 
and another turn of the wheel of good or evil 
fortune would have sent her to keep company 
with Hogarth's Merveilleuses in Bedlam, or 
with Deckar's group of coquets in the same 
place. — The other parts of the play are a dreary 
lee-shore, like Cuckold's Point on the coast of 
Essex, where the preconcerted ship-wreck takes 
place that winds up the catastrophe of the piece. 
But this is also characteristic of the age, and 
serves as a contrast to the airy and factitious 
character which is the principal figure in the 
plot. We had made but little progress from 
that point till Hogarth's time, if Hogarth is to 
be believed in his description of city manners. 
How wonderfully we have distanced it since ! 

Without going into this at length, there is 
one circumstance I would mention in which I 
think there has been a striking improvement in 
the family economy of modern times — and that 
is in the relation of mistresses and servants. 
After visits and finery, a married woman of the 
old school had nothing to do but to attend to 
her housewifery. She had no other resource, 
no other sense of power, but to harangue and 
lord it over her domestics. Modern book-educa- 
tion supplies the place of the old-fashioned 



400 ON VULGARITY AND AFFECTATION., 

system of kitchen persecution and eloquence. 
A well-bred woman now seldom goes into the 
kitchen to look after the servants: — formerly 
what was called a good manager, an exemplary 
mistress of a family, did nothing but hunt them 
from morning to night, from one year's end to 
another, without leaving them a moment's rest, 
peace, or comfort. Now a servant is left to do 
her work without this suspicious and tormenting 
interference and fault-finding at every step, and 
she does it all the better. The proverbs about 
the mistress's eye, &c. are no longer held for 
current. A woman from this habit, which at 
last became an unconquerable passion, would 
scold her maids for fifty years together, and 
nothing could stop her : now the temptation to 
read the last new poem or novel, and the neces- 
sity of talking of it in the next company she 
goes into, prevent her — and the benefit to all 
parties is incalculable ! 



THE END. 



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